Stuck! need help with getting my e90 running

[type4]

Long story short, had a small fire from the blower motor under the dash pasenger side in my 2011 328xi N52. melted the entire wire harness and fuse box and ecm, along with various other things burnt in that area. Also worth noting, the DME had a burn mark on the metal shell (dont know from the fire or if the DME fried as a result internally). I have a doner car, 2011 328xi, but it had the SULEV N51 motor. I replaced all the wire harness and dash and interior. come to find out the dme, cas, are not compatible between the two. So now im stuck. My question are:

1- What do I need to reprogram to make all components compatible? is it just the DME, CAS, and key?
2- Would it be ill-advised to go on Ebay and find a N51 matching set of DME, CAS and key?
3- Can I reuse the ECM from the donner car?
4- How do I find out if the DME or any other component was damage in the fire?
5- Can someone point me to a company or a member that will work with me through this process?

Thank you in advanced, as I know very little about electronic issues.

[jclausen]

BMW has a big recall in place just for this the wires frying and possible catching fire, run you vin number thru the dealer and see if there is an open recall attached to this car but since you have done some work I don't know what that means now

[White94RX]

Yeah, you probably could have had everything covered under warranty. May be too late since you've been working on it yourself already.

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[MauiM3Mania]

Moved from the General BMW Discussion sub-forum.

Good luck!

[type4]

I was to late on the recall before the blower motor fire. But I did figure it out with the insurance and bought the car back. Now im just trying to get it up and running.

[bmwdirtracer]

If I'm not mistaken this was a safety recall, not a service action. Safety recalls do not expire, but they are certainly void if you have done a bunch of work yourself.

If you bought it back from the insurance company, it's now a salvage car, not really worth fixing anyway. There are people here who can mate the CAS and DME. The key doesn't need to be coded, if you have your DME and CAS cloned and mated.

https://www.cars.com/articles/2006-2...1420697798760/

As for what the additional problems may be, you'll need to connect the car to ISTA for diagnosis.

[328 Power 04]

Msv80.0 from n52 and msv80.1 from N51 are not interchangeable at all. Unless you make the conversion to 3 stage manifold correctly, and correctly wire the radiator sensors etc.. you'll have constant DTCs.


You are guaranteed to have issues with the stock dme if it has burn marks, and there were large shorts. Pull the cover off gently and inspect.

There are very few people that can make a used msv80 dme work correctly with your car at least to work like original. The procedure is quite intensive because the dme has very high security.
I've done a few of these, and it's not fun, but possible.
You're definitely not simplifying it with mismatched parts.

[bmwdirtracer]

Thanks, Abel, I was hoping you'd respond !

Type4, 328 Power 04 has the absolutely correct answer on this. Trust his input. There's no one better, with BMW computers.