Lightning hit my house a few days ago, took out the TV and my XBOX through the video port. Power board in the XBOX is fine, but the video chip (Xcaliber) is physically shattered from the surge, won't power up. Turns out (never opened it before), I have one of the rare v1.6's with the LG DVD drive and the Seagate hard drive. I bought it from a local video game store soon after the XBOX 360 came out and before they were bought out by Gamestop. I know the hard drives are locked down with a key, but it's worth asking. What are my options? Bottom line, I want to save the info on my hard drive, or move it to a new system.
Check with your insurance company as these electronics may be covered. I believe you would need a mod chip on the next system you get in order to access the old hdd.
I don't have a problem buying a new unit, especially since the insurance company dropped my policy for bull$#it reasons. I'm trying to make a claim to the surge protector policy, but I don't know if they'll honor it since it came through the cable line.
Simply putting the old HDD into a modded system won't work! You need to read out the eeprom of the Dead V1.6 and read out the key of it. Next you can take a modded system, unlock the HDD and change the HDD key of the old system. Then you can simply plug in the hdd for the old v1.6 and the bios will have the correct key to unlock the Harddisk and you can backup the game saves. That's the easiest way i wuld guess. But you can simply send the Board and HDD to someone who can do that for you. Many people around here should be able to do that in an instant. I would offer you to do it for free but shipping the board to Germany would be more expensive than your next Xbox! regards, Lukas
If the recently deceased system was softmodded, you might already have an EEPROM backup somewhere. That'd make things a lot easier. Also, don't throw out the old HW right away. Only the HDD is locked to the board (unlike the 360), so depending on what box you get you might want to swap disc drives or other bits.
No it's not, unfortunately. SOP-8 isn't all that hard to desolder though, if you don't want to send off the whole board. Or you can construct some kind of ghetto reader and dump it while it's still on the board, I believe (never done that myself)
It's just a simple 2 wire EEPROM, you can build a serial programmer cable for $8 and dump the hdd key and then either write the key to a new console or unlock the disk and pull off what you need.. The second option is a bit of a long shot but replace the encoder and probably the few small passives between it and the video jack..
Could I just swap the EEPROM and hard drive over to another v1.6 board, that'd only take me like 20 minutes.
Sorry I just assumed you didn't want to do that.. Yeah piece of piss actually, do you have a hot air station? you could probably even do it using an iron and tweasers but that may end bad..
Alright, cool. I do electronics assembly in my spare time, so it shouldn't be too hard. Just got done soldering a 40 pin 0.5mm pitch FPC connector, so 8 pins is nothing. Failing that, I've got a friend with a hot air station that owes me a few favors
Surge protectors don't protect from lightning strikes - they stop regular surges. You won't get anywhere. Always unplug electronic devices you value. And always, always have home contents insurance! There's more than one insurance company out there - the second you have issues with yours, find another.
