Bought a used original Xbox that had an X3 in it. X3 works fine in other consoles, and flashes properly. But this Xbox restarts 3 times then "frags". Blank screen and using composite video only. The Xbox is a 1.4 Completely removed the X3 installation. Blinks 3 times then hangs with the eject button LED cycling. Redid the install of the X3 (Cleaner than whoever did it first) and tried the regular firmware and 256k backup mode. Ends in RED led on the X3 control panel and the eject button LED cycling. It has a non stock HDD. I have no idea if the HDD has any proper installation on it or if it works. Tried a stock HDD too just for science. I don't know if you even need a working HDD to at least see if the motherboard boots. I can take care of the HDD later. Just needing to know if a working one is even needed for this test with or without the X3 installed. Same question with the DVD drive. Also noticed that someone installed more memory modules. I redid the soldering on them too to clean up the mess. Would removing those be a good idea too, for getting back to square 1? For curiosity, I doubled checked the CPU and it is still a 733Mhz. Any ideas what is wrong or what to try next? Some Google searching suggested a trace could of been cut on purpose, but I don't recall having to ever do that for Xecuter 3 installations. Another thought was the XBOX BIOS itself. Any means to re-flash the BIOS, when it is in this state? Thanks!
The extra ram is your problem. That is what happens if you get a bridge on the ram. I am really confident saying that! Also you need to have the hard drive and DVD drive hooked up for the X3 to work correct. The smartxx and the xenium will boot to the OS with out drives attached but the X3 will not.
Board is dead or a bad trace on the motherboard. Possibly other damage since it was worked very poorly.
As HEX1GON already stated it normally is a fault of the motherboard. These symptoms show a general failure. It could be everything from a bad eeprom, a badflashed tsop, a cut trace, a short between two pins on the added Ram, a burned out cpu, gpu, Ram or even the mcpx. If you don't need to get it repaired or the board is nothing special don't really bother about it. You won't get lucky with it anymore. But before you scrap it take a look at the added Rams maybe you can spot a bridge there! Or if you don't need the extra Ram just remove all the 4 added Rams. If the board still doesn't show any signs of life other than a frag trash it!
Was just a solder bridge on one of the extra RAM modules that I overlooked. Thanks to davidthomas for the advise. XBOX works! Thanks!
