sxybeemr

Hello everyone.

First, I apologize in advance for the lengthy post. I am new to this forum and we are looking for some help… To give you guys a bit of background info, we have recently purchased two x 2004 BMW 545i (N62 engine) from the same guy. One has been involved in a front end accident and it runs fine(cosmetic damage only with no check engine light), and we were told the other would need a new engine. The one that needs the engine is the one that we will be keeping, and a friend of ours will be keeping the one with cosmetic damage. Both cars are currently sitting in our driveway.

My boyfriend is pretty handy with cars. He has done a few engine swaps before and so on… I mentioned the two cars since we have been swapping parts from the working engine onto mine to see if it could be the problem…. The car in question has 226 000 km( approx. 140 000 miles). At first, the car would not start, it would only crank. We scanned the car using INPA and DIS. We got code 2737 (EWS 3.3 manipulation protection) along with multiple other codes…. He synced the EWS to the DME. The car now starts but it badly misfires…

We hear no metal on metal ticks in the engine which gave us a little hope that maybe the engine does not need to be replaced after all… We have tried swapping the 2 cam shaft sensors, crank shaft sensors, spark plugs, cleaned the vanos solenoids, replaced the ccv, we also tried disconnecting the battery for 24 hours… and still no luck….

We scanned the car using INPA and DIS. These are the codes we get with INPA/DIS:
code 2737 (EWS 3.3 manipulation protection).
2783(hot film air mass meter).
274E(misfire detection, checksum failure)
2748(misfire detection cylinder 7)
2747(misfire detection cylinder 3)
27BB(camshaft control outlet Vanos)
2731(Camshaft control inlet)
27B6(control inlet- Vanos bank 2)
2782(camshaft sensor outlet)
2781(Camshaft sensor inlet)
299B(communication DME-IBS)

We have also scanned the car using a regular car scanner and the following codes come up:
P0102(mass or volume air flow A circuit low)
P0300(random/multiple cylinder misfire detected)
P0307(cylinder 7 misfire detected)
P0303(cylinder 3 misfire detected)
P0014(B camshaft position timing over-advanced or system performance bank 1)
P0011(A camshaft position timing over-advanced or system performance bank 1)
P0020 (A camshaft position actuator circuit/open bank 2)
P0368(Camshaft position sensor B circuit high bank 1)
P0343(camshaft position sensor A circuit high bank 1 or single sensor)

Again, we have purchased the vehicle in this condition and have no clue how it happened.. What happened or how all of this started… We are left here puzzled… Could the timing be messed up? Have we missed anything here..? We did search on this forum and all over the web. Any input would be greatly appreciated! If you guys think of anything else we could try prior to us swapping engine, we are opened to trying anything! We are just trying to see if we forgot anything…

Thank you in advance for the help!

seanjordan20

How old is the battery. That could be part of your problem have you checked the wires and plugs also check the fuel injectors and rail to make sure it is pressured. With the IBS I would say its the battery or IBS failing

H F

Did you run a full test plan on DIS ?. It will test the errors with the highest priority first , and give a fault status and will display possible causes of faults ..

twh

This smells like a problem that cascades and throws many codes. I haven't had one like this before, but you should look at the correlation of all of these. It seems like a position sensor could end up causing all these except for the mass air error. Another weird thing is the checksum error. I really don't know what that could mean in terms of a problem or root cause. Checksum error is a data integrity thing whereby some of the data is corrupted, but the computer is able to know it got corrupted. Thinking some more, one thing to follow up on is to see if all of these sensors are on the same wiring harness piece under the hood. Maybe that wiring harness is somehow damaged.

sxybeemr

The battery that came with the car was garbage. We have been using another battery we purchased last year for another BMW we have. (E39 540i) so we are pretty positive the battery is ok. We also have a battery charger so we can eliminate the battery issue.

You also said to check the plugs and wires. We did the spark plugs and coils. We have also checked the fuel injectors and rails(sorry I did forget to mention that). When checking the rails, we noticed it was old varnished fuel in there. We have replaced the fuel with fresh one. As for the IBS code, it does not come up any longer since we did a reset on the system.

We have not done a full test plan using DIS and we are unaware how to proceed with that... We will be searching the web to see how to do that without messing up the system on the car(or messing it up more than it already is... LOL!) Thank you for that idea! We will give it a try!

We did change the position sensor from the perfectly good running BMW 545i(with cosmetic damage) onto the other one and no luck... The damn thing sounds like it's about to spit fire and choke. But definitely no metal on metal sound. We will carefully double check the wiring harness piece under the hood and make sure it's intact. We will also make sure they're all on the same harness. Good point.

We also just thought that it may be worth to try swapping valvetronic? We will try that today... We will also try to do the full test plan using DIS as it may tell us a little more about all these codes....

Here is a video my boyfriend uploaded of the car "running": http://vid5.photobucket.com/albums/y...pstcbzl6uy.mp4

Listening to my car run like that makes me wanna cry.... I am so anxious to take it for a spin.

Gee_115

If you run a test plan with no revealing results, I would start looking at the DME. All those codes leads back to the DME. You stated you changed all the sensors, coils and plugs so that only leaves the DME. Try to do a reset of all the engine adaptations. Normally you don't lose sync with the EWS and DME unless one was meddled with. DMEs are very expensive so try everything before thinking about replacing.

seanjordan20

Was this car being driven before you bought it? Have you removed the valve cover? It sounds like your valves are about to stick. Was the gas in the car old? Did the car sound like this before the plug change? I have heard that sound on a truck before with a new engine installed. The gas in the tank destroyed the engine in two days. I would have the computer reset then go from there but I am pretty sure the DME is not the problem because it is reading fails in the system checks. I could be wrong. Im just trying to give ideas.

Was the battery you put in the same specs as the old one?

cmyachtie

+1 on that battery, start there and register it in the car, also knowing some more history could be useful, you said you got these cars from the same guy....car-dealer or who?
Why did he say it needed new engine?

seanjordan20

It just seems to me that everything points to an electrical issue. These cars are very finicky when it comes to power. Your IBS probably detected an actual problem. If you did no register the new battery specs if it changed and activated it you still could have a battery/power issue. Even though your battery is good your car/IBS still does not know how to manage it without it being registered. There are just too many errors especially with the airbag light and steering light on. Being that you do not know the history of the car and at what point each error in the car arose (ie did they come on all at once or one by one) I would make sure I get the correct battery and register it with the car to eliminate that 100%. After battery reset I would reset the DME and see what happens. I know when I was working on my car and the battery drained to almost nothing the engine started running crazy and error messages popped up. When the battery charged up and I did a reset it never came back

H F

Actually a DWS manipulation error happens due to too many failed starts . It also happens when the cars stalls too many times . It disrupts the synchronized coded starting sequence signals between the DME and the CAS modules,, and the electronic immobilizer is activated ..