u/Helpful-Work-3090

I'm completely out of hope. I snagged a 64GB refurbished LCD steam deck last time they were in stock. Obviously, 64GB isn't enough to play literally any modern AAA game, so I planned on swapping the SSD for a 1TB one.

Got the steam deck, had fun playing smaller sized games on it, and today, my 1TB SSD came (WD SN770m). Opened it up, swapped it, also put PTM7950 on the APU.

For context, I am a computer repair technician, I've repaired hundreds of computers, and repasted hundreds of laptops. The deck was in battery storage mode, and I disconnected the battery before touching anything. Plugged the deck into the official charger, got a solid light, left it for a half hour, then tried to turn it on. It wouldn't and flashed the LED about every 3 seconds.

Once I plugged it back in, I got the 3 cycling brighness levels of death. This continued for about 2 hours, and I finally had the screen, on a dialog box saying the boot device wasn't found, and to press any key to continue. I inserted my microsd card with steamos recovery on it, and pressed "X". It went black, and rebooted. That's the last I saw of the screen.

From then on, the cycling LEDs of doom stopped, and I got back to solid white when charging. Still no screen though, and no more backlight. I tried going into battery storage mode, and back out. (Which it did just fine, but didn't fix anything). I tried resetting BIOS with the three dots button and volume down. The LED flashed for about 30 minutes, but did nothing. Now, when I press the power button, it chimes, the fan turns on for about 30 seconds, and the haptics work. The fan will go on and off as the APU hits high temperatures, and then drops down. No screen, no backlight. Steam support had me try connecting to an external monitor: nothing. They said that warranty won't cover this, since it bricked while replacing the SSD.

I am completely positive that I did not break ANYTHING during the process. It was the stupid battery disconnection that did it. (Again, I've done stuff like this literally HUNDREDS of times. I know what I'm doing.) I feel like crying right now, there's nothing more I can do.

Last ditch effort, I put the original SSD back in, nothing still. It's dead. What should I do? Steam wants to charge 125 bucks for the repair, almost half of what the deck is worth, and I don't feel comfortable trying the SSD swap after what happened the first time, but you can't play crap on 64GB.