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Repair, disassembly, and troubleshooting information for the Steam Deck OLED, a 2023 refresh of the popular handheld gaming console made by Valve. Released on November 16, 2023. Identified by model number 1030.

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Power light pulsing, won't turn on

Hey all,

Got a Deck OLED, & charged it up for a few hours. It turned on & got to the initialization screen, & I powered it off. I took the 2tb SSD out of my old Steam Deck & put it in the new OLED Deck, along with swapping the back plastic with a JSAUX perforated backplate. Both worked perfectly fine with the old LCD Steam Deck.

I am very, very careful when modding devices, & was just as careful with this. After formatting the 2tb SSD & putting it and the backplate on the OLED Deck, the power button light just gently "pulses" for a few seconds, then turns off & nothing happens. Tried holding the power button for 3 seconds, 7 seconds, 16 seconds, 30 seconds, trying to put it in recovery mode by holding volume down & power, but if I hold the power button it will show the pulsing light for a few seconds, turn off, the indicator light will flash solid white once, then cycle between the two over & over. If I connect the Deck to power, the indicator light will stay solid green.

I took the back off, disconnected the battery, & tried plugging the deck into power with the battery disconnected. Instead of green, the indication light stays solid white, & if I press the power button, it just does the "pulse for a few seconds & then stops" thing same as before, but instead goes back to a solid white light.

I tried using the original 1tb SSD the OLED Deck shipped with, no luck. I tried the 512gb drive that was in my old LCD Steam Deck, no luck either. Same as my 2tb Sabrent SSD. It just pulses white when I push the power button no matter what I do.

It worked just fine before, I was insanely careful, just swapping the SSD & backplate couldn't have possibly bricked it. That's insane. Any ideas or thoughts? I really, really, really hate to need to possibly RMA it to Valve, it's gotta be something stupid.

Thanks & sorry for the novel

Answered! View the answer I have this problem too

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Well, seems like IFixIt may be a good luck charm lmao

Immediately after posting this, the deck decided to POST and give me a boot screen. It went into a few boot loops, and I gave myself a new hurdle to clear by using a bad SteamOS image install USB to reformat, but it was a pretty easy & harmless fix.

I would say what seemed to solve things was using the "correct" power cable - I have an old LCD Steam Deck, which uses the same 45 watt usb-c charger as the OLED model. I don't know if the voltage & amperage is the same on the transformer, though. I was using one of those old ones, since I figured it was exactly the same as the new one. I also have a UGreen USB power hub thing that provides PD power & plenty of watts (more than 45w), but I guess there's something about the Deck that's picky & it needing the exact correct power to work. It's weird. I plugged in the power block that came with the OLED Deck, & it cycled into a POST screen after a few minutes.

Anyway, if you're having issues - make sure to use the "official" power brick from Valve that came with "your" Steam Deck. That seemed to be, I think, what solved it for me. Probably. I hope. Maybe?

Hope this helps anyone else stressing out & suffering, thinking they have a Valve Steam Brick lol

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3 Comments:

I'm having this exact issue. However I have not been as lucky to have it just randomly start working. I'm stumped guess its RMA time on a device that ive had less than 24 hours.

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Using the original charger fixed my LCD steam deck, thanks for posting! 😁

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Had the exact same issue. Using the official charger for a day made the SteamDeck OLED work fine

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