iPad Mini 2 NAND Repair

The person who owned this iPad Mini2 came to us due to trouble restoring the iPad via iTunes- every time they attempted this, it returned error 4013. Apple themselves had been little help- they said it was a motherboard issue, and could only offer an out-of-warranty exchange for £196. (Er… thanks guys!)

Understandably, since they’d owned it for less than two years, the customer was quite annoyed with Apple’s response, and sought help through an independent store. (That’d be us…)

As soon as we received it, we knew what the problem was- Apple’s own support pages state that if you receive error 9, 4005, 4013 or 4014 while restoring your iOS device you should attempt the following:-

• Install the newest version of iTunes
• Force the device to restart, and then
• Connect your device to your computer using a USB cable or update (not restore) to reinstall the iOS.

The bad news is that from our experience, none of these fix error 4013- and this particular error is in fact related to the NAND (i.e. the internal flash memory drive) being corrupted or faulty.

Repairing this requires removing the NAND- hard enough in itself without accidentally damaging the board- then reading the NAND in a special machine to repair the issue, and finally re-soldering the NAND back onto the mainboard. If a mistake is made at any stage, the motherboard can be damaged and rendered useless.

The good news is that we did it– removed the NAND, repaired then re-soldered it, and now the iPad has been restored successfully via iTunes.