Duron will no longer un-lock! HELP!

[D4RK3N]

My Duron 650 wont unlock anymore. I have been using pencil lead and got it to unlock once, but now it wont do it anymore. I went to AutoZone today and bought a vial of Quick Grid rear window defogger repair paint and tried that. Nada! Still wont unlock. I noticed that the L1 dots (for lack of a better term) are very shiny and appear to be polished. Could the eraser (used to clean graphite off of bridges) have somehow damaged them? The dots are still there, but are far more shiny/lusterous than those of the L2 -7 bridges. Any suggestions or ideas?

[Rob Cork]

I had the same problem - I don't think the eraser will have damaged the bridges as I've used one on mine lots of times without harming the chip in any way. Eventually though, after about 4 months of having used pencil to unlock the chip (and having reapplied it a good few times) I suddenly found I just couldn't unlock it again with pencil. I switched to conductive paint, and even that took me about a week to get working. I first tried dipping a sharp pencil into the paint and using that to draw on the bridges, but the paint dried almost straight away on the pencil and I just ended up putting more graphite down. I found the best way was to get quite a large blob (relative to the bridges) on the end of a pin, and paint it on near a bridge, then tease the paint over the bridge. Looks messy, but it worked - it should be nice and silver when it dries, almost like solder. Even at this point though I had to use a magnifying glass to help - I could have sworn the dots were joined but when I looked closely I could see they looked something like this (see attachment). Then I just corrected that mistake and it finally worked!

[D4RK3N]

Rob...thanks for the info. I guess these things are just picky! i have re-applied the paint several times but it still wont do anything. Im going to see if there is a newer BIOS flash and see if that helps.

[D4RK3N]

well, ive tried this over and over...spent 5 hours doing it today...to no avail. I know it is unlockable, because i had it unlocked a few days ago. Is the silver 'ink' found in a conductive pen better than this rear window defogger paint?