Due to competition, many global brands in the field computer technology, reduce the price of their products through the use of low-quality components. In this regard, among laptops, there is a dependence: if a device with good parameters costs relatively little money, then the manufacturer in some part (or parts) mobile computer invested cheap materials, thereby reducing its resource. Let's consider ways to repair a laptop case, which is made of low-quality, thin plastic with a low fastening resistance.
Ways to restore mounting racks.
As practice shows, first of all, in a case made of low-quality materials, racks for tightening and fixing bolts break.
The rack consists of a plastic cylinder, which at one end is fixed to the body and has stiffeners, and at the other end, at the end, there is a metal nut. Most often, the rack can break at the base of the connection to the body, or a soldered metal nut pops out of it. Consider how you can repair these two breakdowns.
Restoring the fastening of a metal nut:
1. If there is a threaded sleeve disconnected from the rack, do not completely screw the bolt into it, and holding it with tweezers, heat it over the gas burner.
2. Quickly immerse the heated nut, threaded up, into the repaired area flush with the surface of the plastic cylinder, and to stop the immersion of the nut into the plastic, cool it with water.
2. Remove the bolt from the cooled repair assembly.
3. Check the adhesion of the soldered place.
Also, in some places of the case where it is connected, for example, to the monitor, you can not restore the mounting straps, but screw the monitor hinges directly to the case.
Restoring the fastening between the rack and the case:
1. To repair a damaged element, prepare baking soda and super glue. Screw the bolt into the broken part of the rack.
2. Apply super glue to the broken end of the rack and to its mounting location in the case.
3. Dock and press the two glued parts. Hold them in this position for about a minute.
4. Spread the baking soda on the body as close to the post as possible so that it covers the break well.
5. Apply super glue generously to the baking soda.
6. Do this procedure 3-4 times.
7. After drying, check the adhesion of the repaired part for strength.
The reaction of combining soda with super glue takes place with the release of heat, which ensures a reliable bonding of plastic parts at the molecular level. It will be easier to break a part of the body next to it than to damage the surface treated in this way.
Hull repair.
The housing may be cracked or chipped. The troubleshooting technique is almost the same, but has some nuances.
Stages of restoration of the damaged surface:
1. Connect and fix the crack (chip). This can be done with nylon ties, plasticine, etc. In case of chips, some, not large, part of the body may be missing. To avoid leakage of glue, cover the formed openings with plasticine or attach adhesive tape or electrical tape on the front side.
2. To reduce the area of glue spreading, around the entire perimeter, make a barrier of plasticine.
3. Lay a reinforcing layer on the inside of the part in a fenced area in such a way that stiffness is obtained in a weakened place. As reinforcing materials, you can use wire, paper clips, pieces of galvanized strip, fiberglass (glass fiber is best laid with epoxy glue), etc.
3. When using an epoxy adhesive as a fixative, mix the fixative and hardener as needed. And then pour it on the fenced, damaged area.
If fixation will be carried out with soda and super glue, then the damaged area should be covered with a layer of soda and glue. There must be at least three such layers.
4. After the adhesive has solidified, remove unnecessary elements (plasticine, ties, etc.) and check the strength of the repaired part.
The photo shows possible options hull repair Asus laptop K53B.
Of course, when buying a new laptop computer each of us is mentally tuned in to the fact that if we have to go to laptop repair, then obviously not because he himself made some kind of mistake. Alas, the statistics are inexorable: most problems with devices arise precisely through the fault of their owners, and a significant share in this list is occupied by mechanical damage. The “first strike”, as usual, is taken by the body, and if it does not withstand, then the question arises of what to do in this situation.
They try to make the laptop case as durable as possible, but still it is not designed for “flights” from the table. Press public transport can also damage the laptop if it is not protected by a laptop case or bag. From a sharp slamming of the lid, the hinges can break or fly off, simultaneously damaging the plastic of the case. In all these cases, repairs will be required.
Sometimes the unfortunate owner of a laptop with a cracked case is in no hurry to the service center: they say that he is not interested in the aesthetic factor, but the laptop works as it used to. This, to put it mildly, is not very rational from a pragmatic point of view. Firstly, if the device received such a blow that the case cracked, then everything may not be all right with its internal “stuffing”. For example, after a while it may fail HDD- along with all the valuable information recorded on it, or the computer simply will not turn on just at the moment when it is urgently needed. Secondly, damage to the case can lead to even more serious damage - for example, a crack in the matrix frame can lead to the fact that the matrix itself will be damaged in a few days, which means that laptop repairs will be much more difficult and expensive.
Replacement may be required depending on damage. different parts body: die frame, die cover, body tray or top cover. Options for gluing or masking defects are in most cases impractical: this can improve appearance laptop but won't restore protective function corps. In any case, your device will require a comprehensive diagnosis, which will be carried out by our specialists. And of course, laptop repairs will be done by ourselves. high level. A-Service has an extensive warehouse, which means that there is a high probability that the hull part will not have to be ordered, and repairs can be carried out in just a few days. After replacing the case, you will be able to fully use your laptop again.
Business - flash drive, fun - hard!
folk wisdom
⇡ Fix it immediately!
Repairing current gadgets is a thankless and often unprofitable task. There are fewer and fewer replaceable parts, the layout is getting denser, and the prices, meanwhile (with equal functionality), are getting lower. A handicraftsman cannot compete with industrial technologies. However, the repairmen mobile phones and laptops do not particularly complain about life (see the articles of 2011 - and). The reason, as they themselves explain, is the fragility of components - screens, cases, power circuits, a number of microcircuits, as well as unreliable connections. Flash drives - "USB whistles" and, to a lesser extent, memory cards - are confidently following the same path.
Almost every user has already experienced at least one flash drive failure, and many probably thought: is it possible to fix it yourself? In the old days, when a fashionable gadget cost a third of the salary, this was prompted by the notorious toad, later - simple curiosity. Indeed, with regard to faulty "key fobs", at least 50-60% of cases are treated simple methods that do not require special training and equipment. Why not try?
Today, repair is once again becoming relevant with an increase in the capacity (and, therefore, cost) of flash drives, and most importantly, with a drop in their reliability. The flash drive market is fiercely competitive with regular price wars. Manufacturers save every cent of the cost and do not care too much about the quality of their products (with some exceptions - expensive flagship models). It is easier for them to include a certain percentage of defects in the price and change failed devices under warranty. What will happen to the flash drive later - "the sheriff does not care."
Alas, often warranty services are not available to the user: either the documents are lost (do many people remember them, at least keep the receipt?), or the place of purchase is far away, or the flash drive has external damage - obviously a non-warranty case. What can we say about gray imports and outright fakes (Internet flea markets are full of them - unscrupulous business, alas, is flourishing). In such cases, self-repair can fix the issue and bring the malfunctioning key fob back to life.
All flash drives, with the exception of monolithic structures, are of the same type and are quite simple: a USB connector, a printed circuit board, on it there are a dozen or two strapping elements, a controller, and from one to eight memory chips (on high-capacity models, they are often soldered in pairs, sort of " sandwiches"). Repair technologies are simple and accessible to anyone who has a soldering iron and a multimeter. Minimal electronics handling skills will not be superfluous either.
Successful repair brings not only legitimate moral satisfaction, but also material benefits. The appeared "extra" drive allows you to more flexibly manage your data (for example, duplicate) and generally feel calmer. According to observations, reanimated devices live even longer than new ones - weak points have already been eliminated, and the owner treats them more carefully.
Very often, the owner of a broken flash drive is not interested in herself, but in the data recorded on it. Data recovery (DR) technologies are fundamentally different from repair as such, since you do not need to take care of the health of the entire device. Flash memory chips, on which information is stored, fail very rarely (1-2% of accidents). They are protected from the vicissitudes of fate both mechanically - by the case and the flash drive design itself (the chips are usually removed from the USB connector, the most stressed node), and electrically - by the controller and strapping. The latter assume all the risks of interaction over the interface, including polarity reversal, voltage surges or static discharges. The same is true for memory cards.
Therefore, the "raw" data on the chips, as a rule, is stored, and the most reliable way is to unsolder all the chips, subtract them at the physical level using special device(programmer, or reader) and collect an image from the resulting dumps file system. The last stage is the most difficult, since it is required to reproduce the algorithm of the controller. Manufacturers are not at all eager to disclose such things, so you have to reverse engineer - the notorious reverse engineering.
The results of labor-intensive excavations fall into a database, sometimes called a decision system. More than 3,000 solutions have been accumulated by collective efforts, allowing you to emulate almost any controller. For assembly, specialized software is used, which is very expensive (about 1,000 euros) and difficult to master. On the territory of the former USSR, as well as in many other countries, two software and hardware systems have gained the greatest popularity: Flash Extractor from the Moscow company Soft Center and PC-3000 Flash SSD Edition from ACE Lab (this Rostov developer is also known for its tools for repairing hard drives).
Reader from the Flash Extractor complex. Interchangeable sockets allow you to connect chips of all major types
It is clear that such technologies are the prerogative of specialists. But this is the only option in cases where the controller burned out or the service information on the chips was damaged. Then the flash drive is not recognized at all or does not give access to data, and even replacing the controller with a known good one does not help (the efficiency of this outdated technology is only 15-20%).
If hardware problems do not affect the controller and firmware, then after the repair the data becomes available again - with one shot it is possible to kill two birds with one stone. True, such a profitable “double” is possible only in the simplest cases, such as a blown fuse or other strapping element. bent USB connector or a broken board (typical breakdowns with which flash drives are brought in for repair), alas, do not apply to them. Often in such situations, the firmware flies, and even after fixing the board, you won’t get to the files.
The reason is in the users themselves: they try to work with a damaged flash drive by pressing the connector with their hand. And in vain - you still can’t achieve stable contact, but the controller is blocked from the bounce (it is equivalent to repeatedly connecting and disconnecting). The flash drive is no longer detected, after which simple solutions no longer pass.
You have to choose whether you need "infa" or the drive itself. In the first case, the user is waiting for professional data recovery (if they are worth it ...), and in the second - repair, most likely independent. It brings the flash drive to the “like new” state, destroying everything previously recorded. So repair and DR technologies are generally incompatible.
How do flash drives and memory cards break? Consider the main types of malfunctions, their causes and methods of elimination.
⇡ Popular Mechanics
Mechanical failures are hard to miss. With regard to flash drives, these are body defects, broken caps and other moving parts, damage to the USB connector (the most common case), cracks and chips on the printed circuit board and radio elements on it. Flash drives do not like moisture, and if they are drowned or flooded, they do not work.
The exception is expensive and rarer protected models, where the internal volume is filled with silicone (they often bear the marketing names Extreme, Voyager, etc.). By the way, the same silicone makes it quite difficult to unsolder chips during hardware repairs or data recovery - each pin has to be cleaned with a scalpel. Monolithic structures stand apart: they are relatively resistant to water and (mild) blows, but serious damage is definitely fatal.
This Corsair flash drive, which came "on a date", had to be literally torn out of silicone
A broken case, a missing cap, jammed moving parts may not affect the performance of a flash drive, but it becomes inconvenient and even difficult to use it, its service life is sharply reduced. With a bent, wrinkled, broken USB connector (as with other contact violations), the flash drive is either completely inoperative, or it is recognized once and will not live long. A damaged board definitely requires repair, but it does not always lead to success - it is difficult to restore the internal tracks of a multilayer structure.
A cracked flash drive cap is one of the most common breakdowns. In cheap models, this happens after a month or two of operation.
Unlike flash drives, for memory cards, mechanical damage is usually fatal: you can not undertake repairs. Printed circuit board paper thickness suffers under any serious impact - conductive paths are torn in it and contact with memory chips is broken. Yes, and the chips themselves can crack with the loss of all "information". So to eliminate it turns out only minor faults.
So, SD cards have a bundle of body halves and (most often) the loss of a slider that blocks recording. In the latter case, the card becomes read-only, nothing can be written to it (the slider itself is not a switch, it simply mechanically opens the write inhibit circuit in the card reader, so that writing is possible on some devices). An SD with a peeled or bent casing can be difficult to insert and, more importantly, remove from the slot. The use of force (tweezers, pliers, etc.) only worsens the situation. There is also a chance that the entire filling of the card will sooner or later fall out of the case - this will most likely finish off the device.
In the hands of an impatient user, the SD card did not last long
Cause mechanical damage- most often the negligence of the user. Flash drives are crookedly and sharply inserted into the USB port of a computer or laptop; already inserted are touched by a hand, foot, bag or mop. Outside the computer, “key fobs” are dropped on the floor, stepped on, sat down, they are run over by the wheel of a chair, and so on. Flash drives are in washing machine, in street dirt and under spilled coffee, they are bathed in seas and baths. I had to see the drives that have been in the dog's teeth.
Models with folding and retractable parts suffer from unnecessary effort during transformations. The moving parts themselves are not very durable and wear out quickly if they are made of cheap soft plastic. This is especially true of various latches - inserting such a “self-folding” flash drive into the port can be difficult. Wear is greatly accelerated in a dirty and aggressive environment (for example, in a pocket next to the keys). Dust and moisture easily penetrate into a USB connector that is not protected by a cap, causing contamination and corrosion of contacts (they are far from always gold-plated, as required by the standard).
The Kingston flash drive tends to fold when connected - the lock of the working position has been erased. The slider has to be held by hand
Puts a pig and the policy of producers. They treat cheap flash drives as disposable goods and save on everything. Hence - a flimsy case, a cap cracking after a week, a thin textolite of the board, careless, mean soldering. More expensive models are usually better made and mechanically more durable. When buying, you should choose them. True, if the money went to an artsy design, then it is better to beware - a frail and slow stuffing can stand in a glamorous case. By the way, these are mostly gift corporate flash drives - it is unreasonable to use them for business, problems will begin very quickly.
More about choice. In life, the strongest flash drives are egg-shaped, not too compact. Long and thin models break first. The more metal in the case, the better - the metal gives not only strength, but also good heat dissipation. The cap is more reliable than the one that is held by friction over the entire area of the USB connector - it will not crack in the area of \u200b\u200bthe protrusions-clamps. It is good when the cap is insured against loss with a cord or cable. Sometimes the removed cap can be put on the back of the flash drive - this is not so convenient, but better than nothing.
The recently fashionable open connector (without a metal bandage, four contact plates are visible) is unsuccessful in terms of reliability: it breaks and scratches easily, and most importantly, it is subject to destructive static. In addition, it is often combined with a monolithic design - elegant and compact, but not repairable. If, for example, the laptop fell off the table, then the inserted regular flash drive the connector just breaks out, but the monolith cracks in half, upsetting both the user and the repairman.
Broken connector on a regular and monolithic flash drives. In the latter case, there is no need to talk about repairs, and even taking data is a big problem. Circled contacts won't help here.
Mechanical repair aims to restore the functioning and reliability of the flash drive, its contents are quite obvious. At the do-it-yourself level, this is gluing or replacing the case, selecting a suitable cap, and the like. In many cases, cyanoacrylate superglue comes to the rescue, especially with an activator (hexane), which allows you to glue any plastic, including "unbreakable" polyethylene and polypropylene. For a loose or bent USB connector, the fasteners should be soldered, especially the ears on the sides (they take a bending load and come off first), and then the contacts themselves. Rough straightening of the connector in the opposite direction - not best method: often, nearby tracks on the board are torn, and repair is greatly complicated, if at all possible.
On SD, instead of a lost slider, a piece of a match is easily pasted - however, already without the possibility of blocking, but few people use it. Contacts are cleaned with a cotton swab with a special tool "Kontaktol" or, at worst, with an alcohol-gasoline mixture. At the same time, it is advisable to observe antistatic hygiene (grounding wrist strap, conductive table and floor covering, etc.) or at least touch a grounded object before work. Remember that cards are sensitive to static.
It is useful to check the contact pads under a magnifying glass - their gilding can be very conditional or absent altogether. Worn, corroded, discolored contacts (not uncommon on cheap cards stored in a humid environment) - a signal for decommissioning, such a card will not work reliably. This also applies to microSD→SD adapters.
⇡ Burned out at work
Electrical malfunctions of flash drives are primarily the failure of the controller (“burnout”), as well as various defects in the SMD binding elements: filters, fuses, resistors, capacitors, stabilizer, quartz. These parts have a break, breakdown, deterioration in parameters (for example, a decrease in the output voltage of the stabilizer from 3.3 to 2.5-2.6 V, at which the controller no longer starts). This also includes problems with the board, including damage to the current-carrying tracks and poor contact of parts. Often during operation, factory assembly defects appear (not completely soldered joints, cold soldering, corrosion from unwashed flux).
This filter (circled in white) burned out from a power surge. Standard treatment - replacement with a similar one or simply soldering a jumper
Contact problems became noticeably more after the introduction of the EU RoHS directive (it is aimed at removing lead, mercury and other harmful substances from circulation). Environmentally friendly lead-free solders turned out to be capricious in application: they spread worse and wet the contact pads, have an increased melting point, and are less durable. High-quality soldering with them requires a high production culture, and small Chinese factories just do not differ in this ...
In such cases, the flash drive most often does not show signs of life, but is sometimes defined in the computer as "Unknown USB device". In particular, this happens when the flash memory microcircuits are in unreliable contact with the board (a frequent case recently is that the flash drive will slightly bend in awkward hands, and one of the legs will move away). With poor soldering, the device can only work in certain position, and then if you press your hand on the case (usually in the area of \u200b\u200bthe USB connector). It happens that defects appear only with warming up, and a cold flash drive works fine. Over time, the intervals of working capacity become narrower and eventually it comes to complete failure.
Electrical damage to flash drives and memory cards can also include water getting inside - most often it is not water itself that causes problems, but insufficient drying of the device before use. It is worth supplying power to a damp flash drive, and the controller easily fails, the reason is leakage currents between the outputs. Of course, prolonged exposure to water, especially sea water, can also cause banal corrosion, but this is not fatal: it was reported that the memory card from the “drowned” camera worked after a year of being on the seabed.
The causes of electrical damage are unstable power supply, discharges of static electricity from the user's body or PC case, as well as overheating of drive parts, primarily the controller (memory chips can withstand up to 100-120 ° C and "burn" rarely). Overheating is facilitated by poor cooling in a cramped plastic case, prolonged active work, or even just idling. Tip: remove an unused flash drive from the USB port, and a memory card from the card reader slot - depending on the OS driver, they can get quite hot, and this is hardly predictable.
A combination of several risk factors is especially dangerous. For example, with an increased voltage of 5 V, the flash drive heats up much more, and an intense data stream, especially for writing, can easily finish it off. The more productive (and more expensive) the model, the greater the risk of overheating under these conditions. This also applies to memory cards - there were reports of damage to high-speed SD during burst photography or movie resets.
Shorten the life of flash drives and cheap desktop cases: they USB ports on the front panel connected to motherboard unshielded loop, collecting all pickups. This gives an extra load on the connected device, which affects its operation - crashes, slowdowns and increased heat. Failure under such conditions is quite likely, especially with ungrounded wiring.
The manifestation of soldering defects is facilitated by increased mechanical loads, especially alternating (bent-unbent), as well as falls and bumps. Although flash drives are considered shock-resistant drives, they usually have a quartz resonator in their circuitry. And this (in typical SMD packages) is a rather fragile part that cannot even withstand a fall from a meter height. If the quartz cracked or moved away from the contacts, the flash drive is recognized as "Unknown USB device" with zero VID / PID codes and is unsuitable for work. Bad controller contacts show up in exactly the same way; purely software glitches are not uncommon (see details below).
This is in need of a hardware overhaul. You can’t do without a multimeter, a 25-30 W soldering iron with a thin tip and a technical hair dryer: you should ring the connections, strengthen the soldering (heating the board with hot air often helps), restore damaged contacts or current-carrying tracks - primarily those that are adjacent to the USB- connector. Defective parts are replaced. We are talking about strapping elements - most often resistors (including zero values \u200b\u200bplaying the role of jumpers), quartz and a 3.3 V stabilizer.
Previously, flash drives often broke power fuses and inductive noise filters in signal circuits. This was treated by selecting analogues or even banal shunts, and the broken discrete stabilizer changed without problems (issue price 20 rubles). True, sometimes the board smoked when turned on - which means that the controller was the first to fail, and the replaced part worked like a fuse.
In modern models, there are no such elements anymore - manufacturers have “optimized” them. All blows are taken by the controller. The stabilizer is also integrated there, so its breakdown (recognized by the instant and unbearable heating of the chip) requires the replacement of the controller, moreover, with the exact same model with the same firmware version (second or third rows of chip marking). Non-working quartz is identified by the absence of 12 MHz generation; for this you need at least a simple oscilloscope of the C1-94 commemorative type for radio amateurs.
A pleasant exception is new models of flash drives with USB interface 3.0. speed device consumes significant current (up to 900 mA by default, in reality 150-250 mA in idle and 300-600 mA under load), so the designers returned to a discrete regulator, this time impulse type, as well as throttle filters. With such an element base, flash drives have become more maintainable.
In most cases, it is not practical to replace flash memory chips - they are relatively expensive, and after resoldering a flash drive, a full-fledged software repair is required, which may not work if there is not enough experience or required software. The controller is also a peculiar thing: such microcircuits are not sold at retail (you won’t order a batch of 1000 pieces), so you can only get serviceable copies from donors. Disassembling a working drive is pretty stupid, so there are flash drives that died for another reason. Considering the current variety of controllers (each model is available in several modifications, which are often incompatible with firmware), a lot of donors will be required - at least several dozen. It is unlikely that a non-professional repairman will find such deposits.
The burnt controller was physically damaged, but this is a rare case. Hardware failures are usually invisible from the outside.
Let's not forget about technological difficulties - for an amateur, they can be significant. It is not so easy to solder 64 or 48 pins with a step of 0.4-0.5 mm (typical packaging of controllers and memory chips, respectively) without skew, “snot” and non-contacts, especially if the tools are not the best. This is also why hardware repairs in most cases are limited to replacing the strapping elements.
As for wet flash drives, including "drowned ones", the three-stage technology developed for mobile phones is applicable to them. The board is first washed from salts and dirt in clean, preferably distilled water, then immersed in isopropyl alcohol (it has a concentration of 99.7% and actively displaces water from capillary slits present, for example, under microcircuits) and finally dried with warm air. Do the same with body parts. Final drying before assembly should take several hours.
By the way, the first who used absolute alcohol as a desiccator was D.I. Mendeleev. In 1890, he proposed to replace the drying of pyroxylin (the basis of smokeless powder) by dehydrating it with alcohol, which is completely safe. Since then, all over the world, this stage of gunpowder production has been carried out only according to the Mendeleev method.
Naturally, all such work is preceded by disassembling the flash drive, which in some cases requires subsequent mechanical repair (there are structures assembled on glue or on fragile disposable latches). The variety of models makes it difficult to classify them. In most cases, the body consists of two halves or has the form of a sleeve where the filling is inserted. Parts are held by a screw (better), friction or hidden latches (worse). In any case, if you are unable to access the board, then further repairs contraindicated.
Fanciful, unusual models are more difficult to understand than their ordinary counterparts
In the second part of this article, we will introduce you to program issues flash drives and methods for solving them, as well as give some tips on how to avoid breaking a flash drive. Soon on your screens!