Chosen Solution
Now before you jump to the obvious conclusion, i have done a bit of troubleshooting. I followed the guide to repairing water damage and successfully removed all of the corrosion. I also followed the advice from the guide to replace the battery. Upon plugging into my mac itunes says it is in recovery mode. it does not respond to charging but i know the lightning connector works because it made the connection to itunes. I’m thinking that my next area to look at is the lcd/digitizer. Does anyone have any advice for troubleshooting this and maybe any tips for troubleshooting the screen? thanks guys! Update (11/30/2016) UPDATE: I decided to have a look at the digitizer assembly and saw that it had evidence of severe water penetration. I tried swabbing the front and rear sides of the digitizer with isopropyl alcohol but there is still evidence of damage. Does anyone have any advice on removing said water damage/testing the digitizer? Or should I just replace the whole assembly?
As a repair shop, you know that water damage can be very insidious. It can continue to corrode under the IC’s well after a cleaning, especially if it was not done in a good quality ultrasonic cleaner. You probably have a problem with your charge circuit (Tristar U2) but you may also have other problems. You need to start probing your main voltage rails. You have PP_VCC_MAIN because your phone kinda works. However, there are over a dozen rails generated by the PMIC and you need to check all of those. You also need to start checking the specific circuitry to whatever doesn’t work on the device, like the backlight or LCD driver. The schematics for the 5 are available in the wild so have at it. If you give us more info on what you find, we can give you more guidance but for now, based on what you have told us, it’s pretty open-ended. Otherwise, you can look for a qualified repair shop that does water damage and micro-soldering repair for a diagnostic.
