Hardware My new 2DS XL has killed 2 SD cards and I dont know why

[liquidgykill]

My New 2ds XL has killed 2 sd cards in a month

I bought a new 2ds XL it was second hand but in good condition, with its original firmware. The first thing I did was to install CFW
(Luma3DS) and Im pretty sure I did it right since I have a new 3ds xl with the same CFW for a longer period of time
without any problems.

Ive used it since over a year and a half with a 16 gb sandisk SD card, I bought this new 2ds xl with the purpose of playing my favorite
gba and ds games and some 3ds games and I played all kind of games just fine for over the mentioned period with no problems
at all, gba, ds and 3ds worked just fine, Ive played it a lot since lockdown.

4 months ago I started to notice that my new 2ds left speaker randomly failed to produce sound, so I bought a new
one on ebay, second handed but working. I opened my 2ds for the very first time and since the speaker is easy to replace
I did it myself both speakers looked the same and the vendor said it was pulled from another 2ds.

I didnt touched anything else inside of my new 2ds, it was clean so in mid June I oppened and closed without any problem, pluggin back any flex cable
and speaker connector.

After that, I was ready to go and play and for a while, like a week after the speaker replacement everything was ok. I played again any game
without problem but one day while playing Castlevania Circle of the moon, a gba game, my 3ds randomly shut down. And every time I tried to
tunr it on the blue light flashed for some seconds and turn off again.

Not knowing anything about new 2ds errors I though my console was dead until I tried to turn it back on without the sd card and it booted
normally but without anything because of course everything was on the sd.

The sd card was dead, my laptop didnt recognize it, I tried an usb card reader and I dunno how but it stopped working after using that same
sd card. The usb sd card reader was also dead and not working. Then I tried to format the sd card on my DSLR camera (canon t5i) and while
formatting the camera shut down and a strong circuit burn smell begun to arise from the chamber of the sd card, I pulled it out quicklyalmost
thinking that I ruined my camera, the camera was ok, I tried another sd card just fine. But somehow the 3ds sd cad that I pulled out just
melted the larger SD adapter and it was clear that melted from inside out, it was hot to hold in the hands.

After that frightening episode with an SD card that ruined my usb card reader, almost destroyed my camera and MELTED it sd card adapter, I
thought that the SD card was the culprit but Im not so sure anymore. Just a couple of days ago it happened again, I was about to play another
gba game on my new 2ds, this time was metroid zero mission, and right after the gba boot screen, the new 2ds just shut down in the same way.

And this time I knew that the sd was probably dead. I pulled it out, turn back on my new 2ds and it worked again. So I dont think it was an
sd card problem, this SD was just 4gb, was a toshiba sd card that I used it on the new 2ds to test it and this happened.

After what happened with the previous one, Im was too afraid on trying to reformat this sd card on any of my devices. So I plugged in
my desktop, it recognized it like it has no format, I opened windows 10 disk manager and I saw that it is recognized with the correct size
but with no partition at all, like a RAW sd card, but It doesnt let me format it or creating a volume or anything, it gives me a cyclic
redundancy error. To be honest I dont care at all about the SD card itself, Ive tried a couple of thins like sd card formatter, testdisk and
photorec with no way to fix it, maybe Im too dumb to fix it but as I said, I dont care about the SD, I have a backup of what was installed
on that new 2ds somewhere.

But Im afraid that there is something wrong killing my sd cards on my new 2ds xl and I dont know what to do or how to resolve it.
Im not tech savy and I dont have tools like a multimeter neither I know how to use such tool.

Is there a way to know if there is something wrong with my new 2ds xl? it seems to work fine, and it never gave me errors in the past with
any kind of game, ds, 3ds, gb, gbc, snes, etc, both times that failed and corrupted my sd was inside a GBA game.

Has someone experienced something similar? is my new 2ds doomed? Im actually afraid to use another sd card and lose everything yet again.
it pains me because that new 2ds was the one I used solely for 2d and retro games, specially GBA.

Sorry for the long post and for my grammar, Im not an english native speaker.
Thank you.

 

[f3rr3t]

You got pics of the melted SD adapter?

 

[liquidgykill]

You got pics of the melted SD adapter?

https://imgur.com/mDYCuNN
https://imgur.com/YQOOdP2
I threw away the SD card itself, it had a very evident deep melt black dot in the same point that had the SD adapter and I cut part of the SD adapter to see the internal damage, it was pretty clear that the meltdown was from inside out. I used other sd cards and formatted other sd cards with the same camera after that with no problem.

 

[The Real Jdbye]

My New 2ds XL has killed 2 sd cards in a month

I bought a new 2ds XL it was second hand but in good condition, with its original firmware. The first thing I did was to install CFW
(Luma3DS) and Im pretty sure I did it right since I have a new 3ds xl with the same CFW for a longer period of time
without any problems.

Ive used it since over a year and a half with a 16 gb sandisk SD card, I bought this new 2ds xl with the purpose of playing my favorite
gba and ds games and some 3ds games and I played all kind of games just fine for over the mentioned period with no problems
at all, gba, ds and 3ds worked just fine, Ive played it a lot since lockdown.

4 months ago I started to notice that my new 2ds left speaker randomly failed to produce sound, so I bought a new
one on ebay, second handed but working. I opened my 2ds for the very first time and since the speaker is easy to replace
I did it myself both speakers looked the same and the vendor said it was pulled from another 2ds.

I didnt touched anything else inside of my new 2ds, it was clean so in mid June I oppened and closed without any problem, pluggin back any flex cable
and speaker connector.

After that, I was ready to go and play and for a while, like a week after the speaker replacement everything was ok. I played again any game
without problem but one day while playing Castlevania Circle of the moon, a gba game, my 3ds randomly shut down. And every time I tried to
tunr it on the blue light flashed for some seconds and turn off again.

Not knowing anything about new 2ds errors I though my console was dead until I tried to turn it back on without the sd card and it booted
normally but without anything because of course everything was on the sd.

The sd card was dead, my laptop didnt recognize it, I tried an usb card reader and I dunno how but it stopped working after using that same
sd card. The usb sd card reader was also dead and not working. Then I tried to format the sd card on my DSLR camera (canon t5i) and while
formatting the camera shut down and a strong circuit burn smell begun to arise from the chamber of the sd card, I pulled it out quicklyalmost
thinking that I ruined my camera, the camera was ok, I tried another sd card just fine. But somehow the 3ds sd cad that I pulled out just
melted the larger SD adapter and it was clear that melted from inside out, it was hot to hold in the hands.

After that frightening episode with an SD card that ruined my usb card reader, almost destroyed my camera and MELTED it sd card adapter, I
thought that the SD card was the culprit but Im not so sure anymore. Just a couple of days ago it happened again, I was about to play another
gba game on my new 2ds, this time was metroid zero mission, and right after the gba boot screen, the new 2ds just shut down in the same way.

And this time I knew that the sd was probably dead. I pulled it out, turn back on my new 2ds and it worked again. So I dont think it was an
sd card problem, this SD was just 4gb, was a toshiba sd card that I used it on the new 2ds to test it and this happened.

After what happened with the previous one, Im was too afraid on trying to reformat this sd card on any of my devices. So I plugged in
my desktop, it recognized it like it has no format, I opened windows 10 disk manager and I saw that it is recognized with the correct size
but with no partition at all, like a RAW sd card, but It doesnt let me format it or creating a volume or anything, it gives me a cyclic
redundancy error. To be honest I dont care at all about the SD card itself, Ive tried a couple of thins like sd card formatter, testdisk and
photorec with no way to fix it, maybe Im too dumb to fix it but as I said, I dont care about the SD, I have a backup of what was installed
on that new 2ds somewhere.

But Im afraid that there is something wrong killing my sd cards on my new 2ds xl and I dont know what to do or how to resolve it.
Im not tech savy and I dont have tools like a multimeter neither I know how to use such tool.

Is there a way to know if there is something wrong with my new 2ds xl? it seems to work fine, and it never gave me errors in the past with
any kind of game, ds, 3ds, gb, gbc, snes, etc, both times that failed and corrupted my sd was inside a GBA game.

Has someone experienced something similar? is my new 2ds doomed? Im actually afraid to use another sd card and lose everything yet again.
it pains me because that new 2ds was the one I used solely for 2d and retro games, specially GBA.

Sorry for the long post and for my grammar, Im not an english native speaker.
Thank you.

It's extremely rare for a speaker to just fail outright, so the culprit was likely something else (maybe the same thing that's causing other issues)
Sounds like there might be a short somewhere that's putting more load on certain components.
The only way to troubleshoot it properly would be with a multimeter (or spraying IPA on and seeing where it evaporates first/where it gets hottest, alternatively using a thermal camera)
I may be wrong but that's my 2 cents.
Can't be of any more help than that though I'm afraid.

 

[liquidgykill]

UPDATE 28/09/2021: My 2DS XL lives again!

Im writing this in order to have documentation just in case someone else is having the same problems I had.

As I wrote above, I opened my 2ds xl changed a speaker, closed the system and in a month 2 sd cards were fried.
Something I failed o notice since I wrote that was that my 2ds xl had a bump on the left side were the volume slide is, I failed to nice this and I think I indeed closed my system the wrong way somehow.
With a lot of fear, I opened my 2ds xl again, I tried to find what was wrong with it, as far as I could see, nothing was aparently wrong; the flex cables were were seated and properly conected, and so were the 2 speakers.
I could find anything wrong inside, but I saw that the speaker's cables were serpenting across the system board, I dont know if this was the case before I opened the system for the first time, so just to be sure they wont touch or make a path to short something I enveloped the thin speaker cables with electrical tape, also I make sure the speaker chambers were properly screwd tight, since you have to disconect and reconect the flex cables in order to open the 2ds xl I obviously reconected everything again before closing the system a final time.
Afraid of testing another SD in the system I turned the 2ds xl on again and tarted to play, I must reiterate that the last 2 times I attempted this in less than an hour the sd was fried and unable to be recovered or to make it worked again, I tried everything in different devices and pc's wtih different software, nothing worked the sd was dead aun unreadable forever. And those 2 SD cards were not faulty or fake or old or bad, so Im totally believe the sd cards werent the culprit.
Yet this time, didnt happened so far, 2 months of heavy use and everything seems back to normal.
Ive played a large amount of time in different games and modes unable to replicate the faulty behaviour written above.

These are my current gameplay times:
3DS
Metroid Samus Returns 16:14 hours
Gameboy Advance
Castlevania Circle of the Moon 12:02 hours
Castlevania Harmony of Dissonance 14:40 hours
Castlevania Aria of Sorrow 14:45 hours
Metroid Zero Mission 7:33 hours
DS
Castlevania Dawn of Sorrow 13:42 hours

Miscelaneous homebrew (including some games) about 8 hours

TOTAL time of use: around 80 hours

So after all this time I think everything is ok now. Yet I still dont know what could cause such critical failure TWICE.

Could the system being improperly closed near the volume slide had caused some sort of problem?
Could it be the speaker cables touching something in the board?
Could have been an improperly conected flex cable?

My only advice is double check everything before closing a console, conections, cables, etc.