Going back to the old thread... <http://groups.google.com/group/atv-bootloader/browse_thread/thread/ 5aea8dc868d948bc#>
...since Google won't let me add a new post to older threads for some reason. I did as Scott suggested and as I suggested. I picked up an non- working ATV on Ebay (Scott's suggestion) and I finally found some spare cycles to examine those via patterns opposite the DRAM chips (my suggestion). Unfortunately, the via patterns do not correspond one-to-one to the DRAM chips. They're offset to the side and jogged differently and incomplete so there's really no way to know which via corresponds to which DRAM ball/pin. Oh well. It looks like the only way I'm going to know if A13 and BA2 are present and connected is to do actual surgery. For those who don't want to look at the old thread, this investigation is in support of whether the 512 Mb memory chips on the motherboard can be replaced with 1 Gb or 2 Gb chips. This would increase the DRAM from 256 MB to 512 MB or 1 GB. Don't get too excited. The 1 Gb chips (four needed) are still $20 each. And the soldering is delicate delicate. Being a silly person, I didn't plug this thing in to test it when I got it. I let it sit around for months and then disassembled it to look at the DRAM. So I don't actually know what problem the seller had with it. I bought two units on Ebay and my hope for both, from the item descriptions was that they tried to hack the things, munged up the hard drives and didn't know how to recover them. However, when I went to reassemble this one, I found a tiny component loose under where the power supply goes. After much searching, I determined that it is a differential inductor used to reduce EMI at the Enet port. So the ethernet jack probably doesn't work. I don't know for a certainty that this was already loose, but the motherboard was screwed down until I started working on it, and I wasn't rough on it, and the component is from the protected side of the board, so I suspect this was loose when I got it. There is also a tiny six contact component loose/missing on the wifi card, so at a guess, this ATV had no communications working. On the bright side, now that I know, it will be pretty trivial to replace the inductor. The wifi card isn't fixable because I can't identify the complex loose component. But I don't use wifi at my house anyway. Jeff Walther --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/atv-bootloader?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
