META Quest 3 bricked OTA update, zero recourse in ZA?

[PAYBACK]

So kids MQ3 was one of those that got bricked in endless boot loop mid last year. At first took no notice of the topic due to the passing of my wife. With air clearing somewhat I took a deeper dive into what could be going on.

First port of call META. Although at first willing to support with out of warranty replacement. Due to item being bought off Amazon.com and me being in ZA they could not proceed. Second, tried Amazon as some sort of mediator. Also came up short there.

Have tried all sorts of resets you name it. Out of options at this point. In a nutshell Power Management Integrated Circuit (PMIC) failure it seems is locking me out of any of these workarounds to try get it resolved.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

 

[EmmanuelGoldstein]

If the PMIC was buggered, it would not boot at all... never mind turn on.

 

[PAYBACK]

If the PMIC was buggered, it would not boot at all... never mind turn on.

Sorry forgot to mention it has never booted since this update came through. At first it was doing the fan pulse "breathing" when it was on charge. Now nothing at all.

 

[OnlyOneKenobi]

There are a few threads on the Meta support forums and Reddit with similar problems, from what I can gather you can try this :

Leave it on a known-good USB-PD charger/cable for a few hours without touching it. Then try holding Power for 30-60 seconds, followed by Power + Volume Down for the same sort of time.

Also plug it into a PC and see if Windows detects anything when you do that. Even if there's no display, hearing the USB connection sound or seeing an unknown/Qualcomm/Android device appear would at least tell you there's still some life on the board.

If you're now getting no LED, no fan twitch, no bootloader and absolutely nothing over USB, I think you're probably beyond the usual firmware recovery tricks unfortunately. At that point I'd be looking for someone locally who does proper board-level repair and can actually check the battery and power rails rather than just swapping parts, but I don't think Meta or Amazon can do anything in an official capacity.