Nintendo DSi and black screen of death (sometimes)

[TheClue]

Good evening and marry Xmas to all

I've just got a DSi for a couple of bucks. I love to collect DSs for parts and try to repair them...it's kind of an hobby of mine i guess (or a mission eheh).

Ironically this particular unit I bought was supposed to work, but it doesn't

1- Turned on, seems to work perfectly. Go away to get a coffee
2- My kids saw it on the desktop and decided to try an old presumibly not working R4 card lying on my desk into it and power it on
3- The console starts acting weird. Sometimes it give me black screens of death, sometimes white screens of death (blue led is on). Sometimes launch menu starts but then freezes with static noises, text strings will disappear although the menu music still plays in the background.
4- With A+B the console starts, but when I release the buttons, it hangs
5- So I tried not pushing the buttons but an empty area of the left-side chassis near them. Same behaviours
6- I did it an hard reset an these hangs are less uncommon, but still presents (it could be a coincidence IMHO)

Fact is that these ARE NOT CONSISTENT. For example, atm the console is on since an hour or more, with no freeze (but it will, sooner or later)

About 2-, is it possible to brick a console just powering it with a crap R4 (sounds weird to me, but I guess it could)?

About 3- and 4- would point me out to a faulty Wifi board, but 3- looks much more serious hardware brick I guess

-> I've some spares DSlite units....is the Wifi board the same among these two models?

Finally, 5- seems to point to a loosen connection rather than an harware fail

I'm going to to the TLmenu SD jailbreak, but before doing that I prefer to be sure that everything is up at hardware level

what do you think I should do?

 

[SylverReZ]

what do you think I should do?

Could be either a hardware fault or a bad installation of Unlaunch.

 

[The Real Jdbye]

Good evening and marry Xmas to all

I've just got a DSi for a couple of bucks. I love to collect DSs for parts and try to repair them...it's kind of an hobby of mine i guess (or a mission eheh).

Ironically this particular unit I bought was supposed to work, but it doesn't

1- Turned on, seems to work perfectly. Go away to get a coffee
2- My kids saw it on the desktop and decided to try an old presumibly not working R4 card lying on my desk into it and power it on
3- The console starts acting weird. Sometimes it give me black screens of death, sometimes white screens of death (blue led is on). Sometimes launch menu starts but then freezes with static noises, text strings will disappear although the menu music still plays in the background.
4- With A+B the console starts, but when I release the buttons, it hangs
5- So I tried not pushing the buttons but an empty area of the left-side chassis near them. Same behaviours
6- I did it an hard reset an these hangs are less uncommon, but still presents (it could be a coincidence IMHO)

Fact is that these ARE NOT CONSISTENT. For example, atm the console is on since an hour or more, with no freeze (but it will, sooner or later)

About 2-, is it possible to brick a console just powering it with a crap R4 (sounds weird to me, but I guess it could)?

About 3- and 4- would point me out to a faulty Wifi board, but 3- looks much more serious hardware brick I guess

-> I've some spares DSlite units....is the Wifi board the same among these two models?

Finally, 5- seems to point to a loosen connection rather than an harware fail

I'm going to to the TLmenu SD jailbreak, but before doing that I prefer to be sure that everything is up at hardware level

what do you think I should do?

Intermittent faults are the worst to troubleshoot. If you haven't changed anything recently software wise, I can only assume it must be a hardware fault, but exactly what is hard to tell.

On flashcarts bricking consoles, the N5 DS flashcart was actually known for bricking consoles by blowing the fuse, due to extremely shoddy hardware design. Your problem doesn't sound like a blown fuse though. I don't see how a flashcart could have caused this, since if it fried something, you'd expect the console not to work at all, not work intermittently. Most likely coincidence, but it's hard to say for sure.

 

[Apache Thunder]

I would check the SD card. It could be failing. Is there one inserted? Try booting the card with it ejected if it has one. If it boots properly then, it could either be bad SD card (or dirty contacts on SD card) or it has Unlaunch installed and Unlaunch isn't liking the formatting of that SD card since Unlaunch can also hang if the SD card isn't formatted to something it likes. (which I find quite annoying. )

 

[Zafeer009]

Intermittent faults are the worst to troubleshoot. If you haven't changed anything recently software wise, I can only assume it must be a hardware fault, but exactly what is hard to tell.