Question re: Franken-Droid

[elderlypunk]

Hi. I have a water damaged A855 which gets to the "Ok to program" screen and no further. It will boot into recovery, but I can't load any ROMS that way, and it is cooked to the point where it will not take an SBF flash either, so I bought a used A855 as a replacement online. Trouble is, my replacement's touch screen goes beserk randomly. Totally inaccurate, sometimes unresponsive, sometimes flailing randomly, ALWAYS very annoying... If I lock and unlock my phone it sometimes helps, but not really. I've tried cleaning the phone with rubbing alcohol, but it doesn't seem to help.

My thought is this: I've seen the directfix.com video on youtube showing how to break down the phone, and I'm pretty confident with the right tools I could do it and cobble together a working phone. My question is this... Assuming the water-damaged Droid is just a motherboard issue is it possible to just drop the motherboard from my replacement phone into the water-damaged one? Or will that just be a nightmare with Verizon? (some sort of EID issue or something?) Would it be better to just take the touchscreen of the water damaged phone and use it with my used replacement phone? The only reason I'm wondering is because, except for taking a bath, my original phone was in very very good condition, whereas my replacement phone has been kind of beat up...

Hopefully someone can provide some advice... I'm not shy about cracking into electronics (my laptop, my xbox), especially since there's no warranty issue to worry about. But I've (eventually) learned that it's way better to get good advice beforehand than to blunder about and do it the hard way... And being that I've never monkeyed about inside my phone, any suggestions are greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Mark

[Droid Firefighter]

I think the one issue you will have is the wet phone having water damage to the screen. My wife dropped hers in a downpour and part of the screen died (touch screen had a couple dead areas). Taking it apart is easy so long as you have all the right size screwdrivers. At this point though what is it going to hurt replacing the screen. All of the parts you pull off that are glued on (gold speaker cover, and the back plate) all went back on without a problem when I took the wife's apart. I had everything apart and separated. Just do it somewhere you have access to a YouTube video to find all the hidden screws. Those are a pain. Good luck and here's to your Droid rising again!

Sent from my ADR6350 using DroidForums

[elderlypunk]

Thanks for the input! I've heard about the dead areas problem, but figured I'd take a shot at being lucky... I was wondering about those glued parts, too... glad to hear they weren't as tedious as they looked... I have screwdrivers on the way, so here's hoping I'm in business soon. Again, thanks for the advice!

[Droid Firefighter]

Let me know how it works out for you.

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[elderlypunk]

One more quick question. Any idea where the EID resides? Is that encoded in the motherboard or the separate antenna thing or somewhere else? Just curious in case I wind up mixing and matching pieces. Thanks!

[Droid Firefighter]

Don't know what the EID is. Electronic Identification?

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[elderlypunk]

Yeah, basically. It's sort of like a MAC address that phone networks use to identify a specific phone. It's on a sticker underneath the battery, and if you change phones you have to give the company the new EID, or EIN (actually, I think that's the proper term) to activate the phone. I was just wondering where it was encoded since I may be mixing at matching parts from two phones.... since I have both numbers, though, I can just play it by ear...

[Droid Firefighter]

To activate it all you have to do is call *228 from your phone, enter the number you want on the phone and wait until it says it done. Since neither phone has been reported stolen or damaged both eid will still be good.

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[elderlypunk]

IT'S ALLLIIIIVE!!!!

I swapped the mobo from the replacement phone into my old wet phone it it works like a charm! The touchscreen on the wet phone seems to have suffered no damage at all! *phew* I guess since it was only in the water for about a half-second it didn't really penetrate... I'm not even going to question it!

Thanks for all your help!

[Droid Firefighter]

Outstanding! My pleasure.

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