Chosen Solution
Hey, today I tried to upgrade my MacBook Pro with the usual SSD+HDD combo. Therefore I tried to remove the old SuperDrive to fit in the new HDD frame. Unfortunately super tiny surface mount component broke off while removing the ribbon cable. It was properly a resistor or something like that. It was mounted directly next to the ribbon cable connection the logic board with the WiFi/Bluetooth board. (component located in red rectangle. http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/812… Photo by ifixit.com) Luckily the computer still works fine. Both WiFi an Bluetooth function as usually. Do I need to do something? Or can the missing component demage other parts of the logic board. (Still covered with AppleCare, btw.) Any help is much appreciated.
I highly recommend that you take the component and the motherboard or entire laptop to a local TV/electronics repair shop for them to resolder the component back in place. They should have all the necessary skill and equipment to accomplish the task. They will probably charge $20 - $50 USD for the repair or what ever their minimum charge for repair is - It is a 30 minute or less repair even if the solder pads received damage. The place you take it needs to have an LCR meter to determine what the component is and if polarity needs to be observed to properly reattach it. They also will need to have good optics. An Apple repair place will charge you $200 - $250 USD to do the repair.
He will just test with a probe what direction the electricity is flowing and put positive to positive and negative to negative(Hopefully). Update you are right they don’t have positive or negative sides, so why would you need to check them for polarity? but on a board and anywhere else electricity in a dc system only flows in one direction their for they would only need to find out what end of the current is positive and what is negative because electricity flows from negative to positive, and if they have something like a logic probe it will tell them when the current is high or low.
randomguy, just to resolve this old question about the missing component. The component is a capacitor identify per schematic as C3422 0.1uF 20% 10V CERM 402 and a replacement would be part number GRM033R61A104KE15D and manufactured by Murata. In order to identify parts like this, is to use a pair of SMD smart tweezers. You can not check the value of a capacitor with a regular multimeter but would most likely use an ESR meter. I do agree with ABCellars about how to get it repaired, and wholeheartedly agree with you, for as long as your computer works, leave it alone ;-) Hope this helps, good luck.
