PS3 Desperately need help with a weird issues I'm having [emoji31]

RCWD21

RCWD21

Member
Maybe you can help me with this weird issue im having.

I have a CECHL01 and when I originally got it yesterday it was working fine on ferrox 4.82. The cpu temps were through the roof after installing webman so today I pulled it apart delidded the cpu and applied new thermal paste as well as transferring everything into a much better condition shell. Well upon start up every time I loaded ANYTHING it would just pop to a black screen and sit there. It also does this weird thing where it won't reboot either, it just goes to a black screen as well.

A little while ago I noticed that there was no sound even over AV cables.

So far I've tried updating any homebrew, deleting and reinstalling any homebrew and finally updating to official FW 4.86, swapping and formatting harddrives. All that and still no sound and I get a black screen when launching a DVD on OFW.

Whats left to try? I'm confused beyond belief, ive jailbroken and delidded tons of systems and never run into this kind of issue before. I dont think its hardware because if it was it would never reach xmb.

Also now when you close the browser it seems to lock on the wave screen. It doesn't freeze since the wave keeps moving.

So far I can load anything I want to this console but if you try to run even a DVD it freezes. It won't reboot without sticking on a black screen.

Any help would be appreciated as I'd like to use this console as my daily instead of one of my backwards compatible models.

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dunno about the audio issues but black screen is caused by disconnected or not properly seated bd ribbon cable. you can try resetting the audio settings too
 
kadorna2 said:
dunno about the audio issues but black screen is caused by disconnected or not properly seated bd ribbon cable. you can try resetting the audio settings too
Click to expand...
I've tried both and even swapped cables from a known working unit, the drive spins up a disc almost instantly and the icon appears on the screen since I have auto start turned off. As soon as you select the movie it goes to a black screen.

This console was FILLED with dust so its had a rough life for sure and im wondering if its not an issue with something being corrupt in NOR. As swapping in a known good hdd didn't fix a thing.

When under safe mode and database rebuild it zips right to 100% and boots to the xmb but occasionally when selecting one of the 2 user profiles it'll completely freeze and be unresponsive with the front buttons leaving the only option to be flipping the switch in the back which I believe is only adding to any corrupt fines that may be present and not able to be "repaired" via safe mode.

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I'm going to try installing the ofw 4.86 via safe mode a few times to see if it improves anything. Its directly from Sony so it "should" be a good file.

If push comes to shove I have another CECHL01 that has bad traces for its hdmi port that I can use to get the nor flash dump from to rebuild this one if it does happen to be the issue but I'll have to get an E3 flasher to find out

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I was able to get a hex dump from the console and it reports with 0 warnings and 0 dangers. I have a sata adapter cable showing up today so I guess I'll be running it on hard disk sentinel along with a few other drives and do a complete reformat and start from there. So fingers crossed [emoji1696]

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Ok so one further update!

I have completely reformatted the hdd via my pc and the disc health and performance is showing 100% with no corrupt sectors via sentinel.

I installed it back in the ps3 and let it do its thing with formatting and installing ofw 4.86.

Andddddd upon booting there is still NO sound and it takes roughly 10 seconds to shut down with the 3 beeps at about the 8 or 9 second mark.

I have several other fat ps3 and NONE of them do anything remotely close to what this console is doing. Is this something common with the L models? I've been reading a lot about bad NOR chips but those always seem to be involved with the RSOD of which I haven't encountered with any ps3 I've ever owned.

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It sounds like hardware failure.
It could be caused by a bad connection after disassembling/reassembling the console parts or by damaged hardware.

You could try getting syscon debug output to identify the issue.
There is a thread dedicated to syscon communication for hardware fault finding purposes. https://www.psx-place.com/threads/f...syscon-first-steps-and-error-reporting.30100/

Additionally, if your console is on CFW or on HEN and you get sufficient time to load a payload before the console shuts down, you could also use a debug build of Cobra/Mamba stage2 or of the HEN mini Cobra payload so that you can receive kernel debug output in a terminal running socat on PC. If the kernel panics or crashes, you will get some crash data in the socat output.
 
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bguerville said:
It sounds like hardware failure.

You could try getting syscon debug output to identify the issue.
There is a thread dedicated to syscon communication for debugging purposes.

If your console is on CFW or on HEN and you get sufficient time to load a payload before the console shuts down, you could also use a debug build of Cobra/Mamba stage2 or of HEN payload so that you can receive kernel debug output in a terminal running socat on PC. If the kernel panics or crashes, you will get some crash data in the socat output.
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Given that I've never experienced this issue before how would or could it be hardware failure? It will sit on the xmb all day long and not once will it freeze or crash. Could all this be caused by a partially failed bluray drive? I don't think it would given that it will load discs but who knows.

I just dont have sound and when you load a disc from the xmb it goes to a black screen like when youre on a ps2 and the playstation 2 splash screen hasn't popped up yet if that helps any. It will take every "update" I give it but when you get into the entry screen where it says the console wasn't turned off correctly and you select to the next screen where it says it will check the system files it will black screen there but if you opt to skip that system check it will load to the xmb but again, with no sound. Ive tried AV cables and still no change there either.

I'm going to try the new method for getting onto cfw and see what I find via what you mentioned above.

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RCWD21 said:
Given that I've never experienced this issue before how would or could it be hardware failure? It will sit on the xmb all day long and not once will it freeze or crash. Could all this be caused by a partially failed bluray drive? I don't think it would given that it will load discs but who knows.

I just dont have sound and when you load a disc from the xmb it goes to a black screen like when youre on a ps2 and the playstation 2 splash screen hasn't popped up yet if that helps any. It will take every "update" I give it but when you get into the entry screen where it says the console wasn't turned off correctly and you select to the next screen where it says it will check the system files it will black screen there but if you opt to skip that system check it will load to the xmb but again, with no sound. Ive tried AV cables and still no change there either.

I'm going to try the new method for getting onto cfw and see what I find via what you mentioned above.

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Click to expand...

I obviously cannot say what the problem is, it could be caused by so many things in theory. It needs to be investigated, no way around it because your problem is not exactly a common clear cut issue.
IF you already
1. reformatted the hdd.
2. changed the hdd altogether.
3. reinstalled the firmware
it's becoming less & less likely that the issue is OS related.

Of course, if it is a second hand console you cannot be certain that someone has not messed with the Flash Memory or the syscon in such a way that issues may arise. We cannot entirely rule out that possibility, yet it is not the most likely option.

Now, yes among other possibilities, it could be a (minor) hardware failure, something like a bad capacitor or whatever, this kind of thing can happen.
You may even have created a short or damaged a component when reassembling the console, it happened to me once or twice through the years.
Additionally, something wrong with the internal hdd can be considered as hardware failure technically.

Check for instance the
NEC/Tokin replacement tutorial to fix a common hardware issue that leads to YLOD.
Am not saying that's what your problem is, am only giving you an example of a common & documented type of hardware failure to illustrate the possibility.

The fact that the system can remain idle on XMB without crashing could be explained. Suppose that the hardware issue is RSX related for instance, maybe not the RSX chip itself or one of its solder balls but a tiny component (cap, resistor...) could be damaged but not dead therefore not functioning 100% as per its specs, the crash may happen only when the RSX is sollicited, stuff like that... And iirc audio is managed by the RSX subsystem too (TBC).

Hopefully, getting some syscon output should help you validate (or invalidate) this hardware issue theory.. The syscon should keep track of the last error that occurred in its error log records & when queried it should tell you in what sub system that error originated, in the form of a code. The syscon commands & the error codes are detailed in pdf files available on the "fault finding with syscon" thread's OP github repo. Check the thread I linked in my previous post for details & github link.
 
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You say that the file system check hangs the PS3 Safe mode?
Hmm.. That's weird..

FYI
An internal HDD issue could explain the problems you're experiencing, it's a strong possibility too & definitely the first one to be put to the test.
Reformatting the internal hdd in ntfs on a PC is not always sufficient to fix all the issues in my experience, it works fine most of the time but I had trouble in the past with a couple of hdds with which ntfs reformatting didn't fix the issues I was getting on the PS3 (those problems included random shutdowns (kernel panic) & file system check failures among other issues). Yet those hdds have been working fine as external storage on PS3 ever since!
I was lazy (lol) & never bothered investigating what was wrong, I probably should have but I just used other disks I had laying around.

Did you actually try changing hdd altogether?
If you haven't, I suggest you start with that.
At least for the moment, as long as you are trying to work out this issue, use a small standard sata disk, avoid ssd & disks > 1Tb.


And btw while you are at it, take the opportunity to rebuild database in Safe Mode.
 
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Yes ive tried a different hdd (albeit from another ps3 but it never had any issues whatsoever. It does this no matter the drive installed.

As for reformatting or rebuilding database in safe mode it will occasionally (say 1/16th of the time) black screen when doing that.

One other oddity I noticed tonight being in a dark room is that when you go from the improper shut down screens before the xmb just a split second before it goes to the black screen you can see what almost looks when you switch an old TV off with that white bar/blob in the middle of the screen.

I can post a video of all this on my YouTube account and link it here if that would help at all visualize things for you maybe better than I can explain them lol

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Also you mentioned that this might not be an OS issue but when I got the console it was on running 4.82 Ferrox CFW. I went through safe mode and updated the console to OFW 4.86 and besides the delid of the CPU and the shell swap nothing else has changed.

On Ferrox it booted fine and everything but I cant say for sure if there was sound either on that one (I've been reading so much between this an a picky xbox 360 that my brain is fried) but it did load pkg files and ran a couple ps2 iso's just fine.

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What I said was that a OS issue was getting less & less likely.
I said this because you changed hard drive & reinstalled the entire OFW firmware.

So basically at that point:

1. CoreOS was fully replaced by OFW CoreOS in Flash memory.
2. And as your console uses NOR flash memory, the /dev_flash partition that contains all the other system files was also fully reinstalled on a freshly reformatted hard drive partition.

In short, every single OS file is guaranteed to have been replaced with fresh official firmware files & the OS was running without homebrew or other custom files installed anywhere, not on /dev_hdd0, not on /dev_flash & not on NOR.

In such a situation, OS file related issues that could lead to regular black screens are extremely unlikely.
If the ps3 worked well on CFW (except maybe sound) before you disassembled the console & now you get regular crashes on fresh OFW, it is more likely imho that the issue is hardware related rather than software related.
 
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Ah ok, well I guess tomorrow I'll try and get it back onto cfw to see if I can get syscon rebug stable and find if it shows anything.

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RCWD21 said:
Ah ok, well I guess tomorrow I'll try and get it back onto cfw to see if I can get syscon rebug stable and find if it shows anything.

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Click to expand...
You would just need Rebug or whatever CFW as well as a Mamba or Cobra stage2 debug build to try to monitor kernel debug output on PC at the time of crash. The kernel debug output is usually extremely useful for most intent & purposes but not guaranteed to give you the answers you seek.

As for syscon error logging, you should read the UART tutorial first, you will need equipment to do this, a USB-TTL converter cable & the usual stuff to solder.
This method makes no assumption on the fact that the console may or may not fully start, as long as the syscon runs, it can be queried this way.

syscon can also be accessed through syscalls, it's possible to read/dump syscon data using custom self but then you would need to make sense of the syscon data on your own.
There is no custom self tool available to perform custom queries of syscon afaik.

Don't hesitate to post in the "fault finding with syscon" thread if you need help with the UART stuff and/or syscon communications.
Don't despair though, take your time, maybe someone else will chime in, in this thread or another, others may have experience with a similar issue.

Keep us posted in any case.
 
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I have a ttl cable on order and as of writing this I'm going to be trying to get this quirky thing back on cfw.

And after reading more and more today I'm wondering if this is something inbetween a ylod and complete hardware failure of a component as the longer its on the weirder it acts. Sometimes it doesn't freeze at all coming back to xmb from the web browser but other times it does it every time.

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Anddddd its gone [emoji31][emoji31] Soumd was there until I went to reboot it for the cfw install and now its back to its old tricks of not clearing a self reboot and black screening.

After the first reboot though the sound was coming through very garbled like when you have a bad audio connection on a stereo system or something.

The console never shuts off or turns red during this, the light is always green.

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I have confirmed it being a hardware issue! What exactly im not sure but tonight after it lost sound I pulled it back apart and took my soldering station heat gun to several components (the nec tokin caps, the cpu, the rsx, and the syscon chip) at 250c to reflow anything that might be weak or crummy. I also assembled it piping hot and with only mulitiman installed to monitor the temps playing need for speed hot pursuit 2 for a good hour my temp never exceeded 80c on the cpu and around 72 on the gpu. I know the cpu likes to run hot but in a warming room that temp is fairly low for being under a load.

Sitting on the main menu for multiman my cpu temp is 71c and my gpu temp is 63c.

I'll be the first to admit that I'm nervous about cutting it off but it has been rebooted a couple of times and the only time it hung up was from my own doing but the little spinning clock in the upper right never stopped spinning so thats progress.

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I played on it for several hours last night and this morning it booted up with sound only lagging a few seconds behind reaching the xmb so I'm thinking its a capacitor that is weak and either not filtering like it should or not charging like it should. So now I'm on a hunt for any schematics that would help me locate the audio output from either the cpu or rsx

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