[8125, K-JAM, P4300, MDA Vario General] AltiVec:
Repairing a HTC Wizard USB Connector

Yes, it can be saved!

The same thing happened to me and I fixed it. What you need to do is get

a soldering iron

some extremely thin silver solder (I used .015 dia. Radioshack 64-035e)

some desoldering braid (Radioshack 64-2090)

a continuity tester (the more needle-like the probes, the better!)

a tiny flat head screwdriver (1mm I think).

All this is available at RadioShack or can be found for less online.

Take the phone apart. This is tricky. Read the HTC repair guides available off of this site.

ftp://xda:xda@ftp.xda-developers.com/Wizard/Docs_Tutorials/Wizard_Service_Manual.pdf

I can do it with a tiny flathead screwdriver instead of the torx that is recommended.

At this point, go on youtube.com and watch some videos on how to do surface mount soldering at home with a normal soldering iron. I found this to be helpful and confidence inspiring.

One thing I did was use the file on my Leatherman tool to sharpen the soldering iron tip to a sharp point. This helped get to the tiny nook that you will be soldering.

Find the loose usb connector in the phone. Its probably in fine condition. The reason why it broke is that HTC did not use enough solder to hold it to the board. Its not likely your fault. In the old days we called this a 'design flaw' and an organization called the 'BBB' would instigate what is called a 'product recall' for what we casually referred to as a 'lemon'.

Now, solder the four corners of the USB connector to the board. It probably won't be hard to put it in its original place. Don't leave a cold solder joint... make sure the dolops of solder are nice and shiny.

Then carefully proceed to solder the pinouts on the connector to the traces on the board. This is easier than it looks because the thin solder will flow right onto the traces under the connector.

If you accidently short two traces with solder, then use the desoldering braid to suck it up. Be extremely careful not to lift hard on the braid and pull up the traces. This did not happen to me, but I was careful.

The thing to know is that the USB connector has 5 pinouts but the USB standard only uses 4 of them. Google Mini USB connector pinouts and study which pins go to which wires: http://pinouts.ru/Slots/USB_pinout.shtml

When you think you have succeeded at soldering, use the continuity tester on your multimeter to check your work.

Check for short circuits between the traces.

Plug a mini-usb cable into the phone and carefully check continuity from the far end of the USB cable, to the trace on the motherboard of the phone. All four wires on the USB cable should match to the corresponding traces on the board. This is pretty logical when you are actually staring at it. But just in case, what I am saying here is, take one conductor of the continuity tester and place it on one pinout of the usb connector on the phone. Take the other conductor of the continuity tester and put it on the corresponding wire insider your 4 pin USB-A cable connector. If you hear the multimeter beep, you succeeded.

These diagrams show which pinout goes to which wire: http://pinouts.ru/Slots/USB_pinout.shtml

If everything checks out. Reassemble the phone, and see if it charges with the wall charger. If it does, then see if you can get it to sync with ActiveSync. If the phone doesn't show up in the device registry (or the MacOS X System Profiler), you definitely have not soldered it properly. Be sure the phone is on of course.

PS. Finally, was it all worth it? Well, it was great to get my data back, now its time to go get an iPhone! I mean really, all of this hacking is not worth your time. The iPhone is a far superior cell phone in every aspect. Who wants to screw around with installing half-baked ROM files and buggy M$ platforms? I digress.

PPS. I was able to do all this with MacOS X running VMWare Fusion, Win XP SP2 running Active Sync. So you don't even need a PC!