So my buddy's 360 DVD drive died and hes already ordered the replacement. I already know how to take the 360 apart and put the new drive in, my question is can i just drop the new drive in or do i have to do anything in addition to that, as far as the firmware or whatnot is concerned. Thanks in advance!
you need to extract the key from the original drive...the new drive wont work in his 360 without it..you cant just pop and play.
First you need to find out which drive you have. If you have a Samsung with MS25 you're in luck. If you have anything else you need a certain SATA card with a VIA chipset. I haven't done this in a while, I think it goes like this: Open 360, unplug sata cable from 360 board, plug into PC motherboard. Run an aligator clip from the 360 chassis to the PC case so it doesn't short out. Boot up to a command propt with a bootdisk on your PC. Power on the 360. Type the command, can't remember it. Power off the 360 then back on like 4 seconds later. It'll dump the firmware to the floppy. Now you just get the key out of the firmware after you boot back into windows. Every single guide ever: http://forums.xbox-scene.com/index.php?showtopic=513412 Just find the one that relates to the drive you have.
ok thanks a lot everyone, that link was very helpful. gonna try doing it tomorrow and ill post an update to let you guys know how it went.
As long as you dump the firmware from the first drive correctly, It's very hard to go wrong. Good luck.
I dont mean to hijack this but as i`m getting a 360 with disc read errors, is it possible to just replace the laser unit or do i have to do something with the firmware aswell ? Dont know yet what drive it has.
just wanted to give you guys an update, i havent had a chance to try it due to my buddy randomly dissapperaing for the weekend with his wife. when he gets back im gonna try it though. wish he would have dropped the system and drive off before he left though, i wanted to mess with it on my weekend off:-(
i wouldnt really say you should "mess" with it...not all drives are completelly safe...what type of drive does he have?
He has the Toshiba-Samsung TS-H943, he already has the replacement also. i can put the new drive in, im not worried about that. its mostly the firmware stuff that im worried about. i should be able to handle it though, so hopefully in a few days you guys will be reading about the successful swap, either that or ill be posting "OMFG i cant believe i killed the drive" lol. on more quick question, if i screw up flashing the firmware to the new drive will it be useless, or am i able to re-flash it? it would make me worry a lot less if i knew that if i screwed up i could just retry it again. thanks again to all of you for your time and help.
Ok, so I put the new drive in, was quite easy actually, but even with a BRAND NEW drive in his 360 it still refuses to read games. Any ideas as to what the problem could be anybody??
yeah i flashed the new drive, whenever we put a game disc in it either gives a white error screen with black multi-language text ( cant remember the exact message) or it will load the game and within 2 to 5 minutes it will give a disc is unreadable message. at first i thought it waas just the game we tried, but that got proven wrong after we got the same results with his whole library of games ( 20 - 25 ). Im stumped, i figured that replacing the dvd drive would fix it.
ok so now we have his system running PERFECTLY! its wierd but all we did is cleared his hard drive cache and it started playing games again. why something so minor would make the new drive not read anything is beyond me, but there ya go.
OHh usually updates and cache can throw off reading a disk...not physically tho, the drive can read the disk fine just usually sometimes its the software preventing the drive from reading the disk.
