I recently installed my X3 not to long ago and had to troubleshoot the whole thing about 3 times. The problem I ran into was intermittent boot ups and certain things not working or the bios would half load, I knew the bios half loaded because I set the front led of the xbox to cycle colors when the bios would load one of the times I got into config live with a successful boot. From there it would half load with a black screen and the cycling led colors. What you should do is try that and see what happens, furthermore unplug everything from your chip accept the do/hdd/lan wires and see what you get. With the switches unplugged it defaults to the first 1MB bank. If boots are still intermittent try to see if booting to the backup rom works every time (you will need the eject adapter board plugged into the chip for this test and only this part of the install do not plug in any bank selectors or anything else) this is performed by pressing both eject and power at the same time. If u can boot to backup rom 100% of the time try flashing and see of it gos threw via http flashing or if it's responsive from your Web bowser (mine wouldn't flash or recognize the bin file at this point) depending on your results running these tests will tell us if there is a problem with your pin header installation. My whole problem was an intermittent pin header install, back in the day when I was just starting to do soldering on the og xbox I had a bad habit of lifting pads and traces....so now when I had new equipment (a digital temperature readout on my soldering station) I juse set the iron at a low temp (about 180c) to the point it was just hot enough to melt the solder on my spool. This posed as a problem because the solder points were either cold solder joints or the solder did not flow onto the pads on the motherboard correctly. What I did to remedy the situation was cover the bottom of the lpc port with a good heavy dose of soldering paste/Flux (I still used it prior but I was increasing soldering temperature so I increased the amount of Flux used also) and went ahead and retouched up all my soldering point ts on the pin header. To my suprize I even ended up adding solder to a lot of the pins because when I reheated the pins at a hotter temperature the solder flowed appropriately into the lpc port on the motherboard to complete the connection as it should have. Hopefully this will give u some ideas on what to test and where to look I didn't read threw all of the reply but I do know this sounds a lot like what I was experiencing.......one other side note...if the correct banks on the dip/bank selection switches are not set properly on boot up you will get a FRAG Example: If you flashed the x3 bios to on on off off and try to boot with just on off off off this will result in 3 start up attempts by your xbox and then a FRAG EDIT: nvm.....I see it's sold...that sucks wish I would have seen this thread sooner...I have an X3CP with a dead lcd screen that needs replacing
