All, I'm rediscovering original Xbox. Playing my games again, picking up some new ones...and I even played some LAN games with friends last week. Hooray! As part of this rediscovery, I've been gifted two additional, busted xboxes. Details below: 1. Intermittent DVD drive. System Starts fine, acts normal. However, the DVD drive is weak. If you're lucky a game will load, but if you're not, you'll get a disk read error. 2. Dead Hard Drive. System powers on, but the hard drive clicks. You get the "Contact Customer Service" screen. Would like to get both of these running again. I love to keep my consoles stock and would like to, if possible. Seems like there's parts to get at least one of them working. I've done my research into this. Drives are tied to consoles. No easy swapping. Am I right in thinking that the only way I'm getting these working again is with a chip? Thoughts? Ideas? Comments?
HDDs are tied to consoles, DVD drives aren't. So you could just swap that and #1 is working. #2: A chip's the way to go. Make sure it's preflashed (most seem to be). ...well, or you could desolder and read the EEPROM, build a new HDD, lock it with the console's key (it's derived from the EEPROM data) and use that. Lots of work though...
Sweet! Thanks for the info. Come to think of it, I only really read about hard-drive repair, and only glossed on the DVD stuff. That takes care of one. I read about the building an EEPRom Reader and attaching directly to the board. That doesn't sound too bad, but the hard drive rebuilding sounds awful. Especially because I don't have a desktop PC to hook it to anymore. Any suggestions on chips? Think dirt cheap, and easily purchased, please. Believe it or not, I've never purchased a mod-chip for anything before. Also, final note: PSA - Remove those clock capacitors, gang. Yet another XBox I've opened that's a mess due to this issue.
No need to desolder the EEPROM to read it. I have saved a couple Xbox doing this. I build the simple reader and it worked. It is still a somewhat tricky operation, the Xbox will power itself off after 1 sec when the reader is connected so you gotta dump the data in that time lapse. It is probably more convenient to install a mod chip, especially if you plan to have a hardmodded xbox, you strike two birds with one stone.
I just use a mod chip on a solderless adapter to lock and unlock hard drives. But I just ens up soldering pin headers on all the consoles that I work on. If you need a cheap mod chip let me know. I have a ton of mod chips for the xbox. I like to use mod chips always and that way you can use backups or load a different dashboard and place backups on the hard drive. Trust me you should just leave the mod chip installed and forget about locking a hard drive at all. With the mod chip installed it skips the check to make sure hte drive is locked.
