My debug Xbox is acting strange (power button isn't working, but powers on still).

Yesterday evening, I came home from work... to find that my original debug Xbox was ON! I haven't turned in on in a while, and nothing was different about my apartment, except for the fact that some maintenance people were working in the corridor because the ceiling covers were gone. How it turned on all by itself, I don't know. All I know is that when I tried to turn it off, the power button didn't work! I had a disc in there, so I tried ejecting it. The tray ejected fine, but when I pressed the button to close it, it turned off. Tried it again, same thing happened. So I unplugged it to reset the PIC and left it unplugged the entire day. Came back today, and plugged it back in. What happened? It turned on the moment I plugged it in! I tried pressing the power button. Nothing happened, but opening and closing the tray didn't shut down the Xbox this time.

I've never seen or heard of this happening. This is completely a new phenomenon to me. Is my debug Xbox dying? If it is, then I guess I can say it's lived a full and blessed life, but I don't want to see it go. Anyone else ever had this problem? Any other ideas?

 

This recently came up in another thread: http://www.assemblergames.com/forums/showthread.php?49667-Flaky-Xbox-what-s-the-cause

Sucks to hear that happening to a debug box.

 

Thanks for the link JayFox. I had no idea that this could happen to Xboxes, and the fact that it's happening to a debug Xbox is indeed quite sad because they're becoming harder and harder to come by. I guess if all else fails, I could find some modded 128mb retail. Quite frankly, I'd rather not do that, but at the same time, my money is going towards other things, so I'm not entirely sure I'm going to immediately spend an arm and a leg to get it fixed right now. Later on, I guess.

Right now, I don't have my torx screw driver set to actually open it and see what's going wrong. Microsoft isn't going to fix it, but there are a few console repair shops out here. Maybe they'll get the pleasure of fixing it.

 

Leave it unplugged. Should never leave the XBOX plugged in, especially now and being debug kits they have Foxlink PSUs.

 

Now they tell me. I wish I would have known this before. Is it really the PSU that's causing this?s

 

Honestly, it sounds more like a leaked capacitor than anything else.

 

I hope that isn't too serious of a problem. If that's all, then I will gladly spend the money to save my most prized relic next to my NV1.

 

This is precisely the same behavior my xbox has exhibited for several years now. Exactly the same thing with the buttons, turning on by itself, etc. I couldn't see any leaking caps myself, but small trace corrosion was present in several spots. Surprised yours made it this long without acting up. If you are good at soldering you can fix bad traces yourself. Having someone else fix it probably won't break the bank either. In my case, with a normal xbox, I'm just going to replace it with another standard one.

 

Not exactly, but what I meat was, fox link PSUs can catch fire or fail while in use or plugged in. Never leave xboxes plugged in, and since the board has a bad trace (issue of it turning on or randomly ejecting) having it unplugged won't make it turn on while you're out or while the system is unused.

 

I dont worry about having Xboxes plugged in. Its when the wire wiggles and sparks that is the issue, or so it was told back in the day. If anything, that could be made worse by plugging and unplugging the Xbox.Thus the solder points of the Foxlink power supplies being an issue, and no one really thinking the new power cord would fix anything.

 

I meant unplugging it from the wall. Or just turning off at the wall.

 

I hope I'm not breaking any rules here (if I am, sorry), but since I have no soldering experience whatsoever, I wouldn't be able to go about fixing my trusty debug Xbox all by myself. Would there happen to be someone on this forum that knows how to fix Xboxes that need soldering jobs? I would search for someone local, but I haven't found anyone who's specializing in fixing consoles besides the 360's RROD (even where I live, which is surprising since I live in one of the largest gaming/dev capitals of the world). Or, if anyone of you lives near Seattle, I'd gladly pay you out of pocket to do it. Someone mentioned some guy that was skilled with Xbox modding, I can't remember the name, was it "Truly", "Trusty", something like that?

Well, I guess before I do anything, I should get a new set of torx screw drivers, and look around at the common problematic areas.

Shogun.

 

What way do you want it to be repaired? There are several ways of repairing it.
The easiest is solder in wires for the broken traces, but that maybe just a temporary fix till the next trace corrodes off.
The better but a lot harder way is to use a good condition donor board and transplant the eeprom, tsop and MCPX to it.
That way the Debug kit would have a new board and you could choose the revision you want it to be.

Here are a few pictures showing that it can be done:



The pictures show a chihiro board that had a burned out MCPX-X2. After i replaced it with a retail TSOP, eeprom and MCPX-X the board worked again (as a retail board!).
Sadly i'm in Germany so shipping would be relatively expensive.

 

Shoot APE a pm,bet he could fix it easy.

 

I was thinking of the former option because I'd like to attempt to keep the original mobo.

Okay, I'll ask him. He's in California state, so shipping wouldn't be too much going his direction since I'm also on the west coast.

Shogun.

 

Wow. sounds logical, but they are pin compatible? X2 and X3?

 

Yes they are 100% pin compatible. You can use a Retail motherboard as a Donor and upgrade it to be a Debug kit or a Chihiro if you replace or reflash (tsop and eeprom) the necessary parts. Only problem is you would need a debug or development kit as a donor for the MCPX-X2...

 

Thx, ill see if I can get some of broken boards