TSOPped original xbox boots to ms dash

I bought an original xbox that doesn't have a modchip installed but the bootup screen shows the ind-bios so I'm betting its EPROM is flashed with the TSOP method.
My issue: the box boots into the ms dash. I figured I'd load up my 007:AUF disc to run the softmod exploit and see what's going on... but the unit rejects every game disc I throw at it. Audio plays fine, so I swapped the dvd drive with one from a working xbox and discs are still not recognized.
My suspicion is that the console is set to NTSC mode while I only own PAL discs.

Now I'm not looking to spend to much time with this unit so using xboxhdm to prepare the hdd using some computer that still has IDE buried in my garage is a last resort.
My questions:
- anything to debunk my ntsc/pal suspicion?
- would a region free patched but burnt exploitable game work, or is the region check still performed by the ms dash?

 

Well if you really have a modded BIOS flashed, it shouldn't care about PAL/NTSC. Fwiw, the region is checked by the BIOS, not the dash, and the console gets its region from the EEPROM so rebuilding the HDD wouldn't help.

If I'm not mistaken, there's a Battlefront demo that's both region free as well as bootable from DVD-R even on retail consoles, meaning it should work everywhere (well as long as the disc is readable, obviously). Give it a try, if it won't work sth's seriously wrong.
(A dashboard update xbe might work too, but don't quote me on that.)

 

U could burn a copy of hexen utility disc and check/reflash the bios from that. It's been a while but I think it also reads the key vault on the eeprom making a HDD rebuild easier.

 

I remember that battlefront demo, was very cool stuff!
Hexen didn't work, disc got rejected.
What I ended up doing was incredibly simple but the road was incredibly painful. Wasted a good couple of hours to get xboxhdm2 running as my old trusty 1.9 disc wouldn't find the ide hdd when booted from a sata optical drive... So count 1 hour for searching but failing to find an ide dvd drive wasted
Then tried xboxhdm2, but for whatever reason slax 6 has an x11 issue on my old pc causing it to boot to a black screen before it's done. Eventually I converted the slax 6 modules to the new sb format thing used in slax 7 and got it to boot. Now this is where I really realized how much time I had wasted: the drive wasn't even locked.
So what I then did, and could've done right from the start.. Fired up windows, xplorer360 and found the c:/ind-bios.cfg was missing. Placed default config there and it booted straight into unleashx. Should've been a 10 minute job in the end