Hi =) I wanted to do some experiments, so I dug some Xbox stuff out of my closet, some things a decade old. One of the old Xboxes I have seems to be a SmartXX-modded retail system, with some kind of hacked firmware on it called "iND-BiOS" that had its own hacked boot animation. However, it doesn't seem to load retail games, thinking that they are unauthorized for whatever reason. Oddly, I stuck in one of my Microsoft-made XDK recovery disks and it booted fine. Is iND-BIOS some kind of debug firmware? Anyway, I want to restore the system to full retail, but leave the SmartXX installed. I want the ROM to be the retail ROM, and the retail dashboard. In other words, make the system only able to run legitimate games, no hacks, etc. How could I accomplish this with SmartXX? SmartXX told me the hard drive unlock key, so I could presumably unlock and lock the drive easily, and back up the EEPROM. It's weird being someone who was a big time Xbox 1 hacker and not know how to do this stuff anymore. The big thing is finding files - these used to be easy to find. I have no idea where to get the retail dashboard files now.
All I can tell you is the IND-BIOS not loading retail games is not right. Something must be hacked or glitched with the one you have. My 128MB modded console runs the IND-BIOS 5003 revision on a TSOP flash and it loads both retail and debug games just fine.
Flash it with the SmartXX BIOS, and run EvoX to flash it. Then you can restore the XBOX back by XBOXHDM, or install the latest XBOX dash, and make it the default booting dash then remove all other mods.
I have three bootable Xboxes and all three Xboxes are returning errors reading every single one of my retail games. Using a debugger on one of them suggests that the drive is returning a physical read error. One of the Xboxes is a Focus (v1.4?) retail system with a SmartXX - this one. Another is a v1.0 debug kit. The third is a v1.0 debug kit motherboard in a v1.0 retail chassis with v1.0 retail DVD-ROM/hard drive/USB daughterboard/power supply. I have tried two different debug firmware versions with both debug kits. I have also tried making my own retail game loader hack rather than use "Retail Game Loader 1.2". Do Xbox 1 disks go bad after a decade in storage? Do Thomson drives?
Could be a bad laser which Thompson and Philips drives are notorious for. Pot-tweak and see if you're able to boot a game on it, if it at least loads a loading screen then the system should be ok.
They can. I have 3 of the Samsung SDG605B drives and all 3 lost their lasers within a week of each other.
Yep, the problem was the Thomson drive. >.<. I'd need a new Xbox DVD drive to fix it. That or a different Xbox, since installing SmartXX on anything before 1.6 is pretty easy.
If you can find a GDR-8164B for a replacement it will future proof the system for quite a while. You will need the 8164 DVD ADAPTER in order for it to work.
