Chosen Solution
The iPhone 5 in question has water damage. The phone started showing ‘Searching’ and the imei is gone from the ‘about’ section. The phone tried to do an over the wifi ios update and it failed. I didn’t notice the imei was missing at the time and I went to update ios via iTunes and that failed with an error 16. The phone is now stuck on the iTunes connect screen and will not restore in dfu, The iphone cannot be found… (no backup either) I researched the crap out of this and I am seeing people mention changing a baseband IC but not getting into any specifics. Does anyone know which location/name IC is needed to be reflow/replaced to fix this issue? Any way of restoring this phone? Thanks..
If the baseband IC really is fried, you’d have to replace the baseband processor(see ifixit teardown for MDM9615M) and the baseband flash memory(next to the baseband there are 2 RF connectors, and the flash memory is the silicon chip in between) as a set, then reprogram the phone serial number to match the new set, which is a very expensive and difficult repair. I recommend starting to diagnose baseband power/communication issues first, maybe the chips aren’t dead, they just couldn’t work because the surrounding circuits fried.
Thank you for responding. I am in need of fixing this! Do you happen to know the names of the IC/RF components and maybe the locations? Any more information towards the reprogramming? I’ll check out the rest you mentioned. Thanks a bunch
