XBOX360 Falcon E-76

 I need to give some background on this 360. I bought it for £10 on Gumtree in the summer. It was sold as seen, no other peripherals, just the box. I wanted a black case as
I had a damaged case from previous disassembly, bit heavy handed but I`m not perfect.
I got it home and plugged it in to be be greeted with this.

  One RED light to the bottom right and E-76 on the screen. Quick google and this points to
a bad ethernet IC, possibly blown by a surge of power (lightning?) up the ethernet cable to
the IC. I left it at that till now as I had plenty of other things to break in the mean time. I did order some replacement IC`s from Aliexpress and put them away for another day.

Lets get it open and see whats going on, get a look at the IC in question and see whats what!

Not too dirty, but some damage visible to the  Ethernet IC 1893BF top left above.

Heres a closer pic, look at pins 3 & 4, pin 1 being the one closest to the INDENT DOT on the IC. A bit of leg damage, possibly from an impact, badly fitting the DVD drive more than likely as nothing else would warrant messing around up here.
          With nothing to lose and a chance to practice with my heat station, I`d give it a go, worst case I have a practice mobo full of parts and a black case which i wanted anyway.
I used Kapton heat resistant tape to protect areas I didn`t want to cook.

     Ive seen people remove IC`s with a heatgun and some loaded the IC legs with low melting point solder to help the process. I do not have any so I`m going for the mega flux option. Lots of it and high heat. Hopefully IN and OUT fairly quickly. I turned on my heat station and patiently waited till it was hotter than hell.

      Well if hell was 338 degrees C. The unit goes to 500 I think but I saw sense.
concentrating on the IC and moving all around it, lots of smoke as the flux burnt away, it slid away from its pads. Unfortunately minus two pads, pins 3 & 4 that looked to have been crushed in the pic earlier.. So I`m in balls deep now, so lets look and see what can be done.

    
As seen above pads 3 & 4 are missing, I need to check the schematic and see where they
connect to and see if i can solder jumper wires in. Google again and I found a Falcon mobo schematic.

         Here is IC 1893BF and on the right side Pin leg 3 joins to Resistor R1N7 which is underneath the motherboard. Pin leg 4 has a few options, all close to the leg, no worries with that. So new solder to the remaining pads and on with the replacement IC.

       Flux everywhere but looks ok, not great, but give me break, first replacement IC with my heat station, every days a school day! Now to run Pin leg 3 to the rear on the board.

    
Red arrow marks the point. The top point was so small as it was around 5mm of wire straight to a solder point. Im not great at stopping and taking photos, I get carried away which aint good on a blog. Both legs now had connections so it was time to move forward.
            I fancied fitting some blue Leds to the Ring Of Light switch on the front panel, on a black box i think it looks better. This was fiddly alright, I got rolls of 0603 SMD LED`s in different colours for around £10, theres thousands of them!

The 4 corner LED`s were easy enough with the heat station, new blue replacements I had to resolder a few times testing with a small wired battery to make sure I had the correct orientation, clockwise fed if i remember. With that little mod done I fitted a Coolrunner modchip, maybe another blog for another day doing that. All went well and so far so good, time to reassemble.

   New thermal paste on heat sinks of course!

      I`m going to have to play on this one for a while to make sure its fault free, get it
working and even leave it on overnight. In time I can mod a controller to matching blue and find its PSU and cables cheap online. So I`m not over confident but fingers crossed this will be fine down the road, enjoyed the IC removal experience and saved another box from the tip hopefully!