I just received 2 xbox debug kits and one of them seams to boot into the retail dash (no XDK launcher etc) , what gives ?
It's possible that either a previous BETA live kit, that's had the BETA sticker removed and sold as a debug kit or it's been set to launch to the retail dash. Another user had the same issue with his debug kit, he told me about pressing Power+Eject. See if that works for you man, Borman might have more information on this matter as I'm not really an expert in Debugs.
Most likely it is a standard debug kit launching to the retail dash like you said. Try to connect to it with Xbox Neighborhood and see what happens, or boot a prototype, or something
Debug systems actually had two modes: full debug and pseudo-retail, which Microsoft documentation called retail. In reality, this retail mode was the same as retail, except the kernel, EEPROM and CERT keys were set to their debug versions, so that they ran debug builds of games. The whole point was to be able to test games on DVD-R or DVD emulator with almost the same environment as the end user would have at release. To switch back to debug mode, just burn a debug recovery ISO image to DVD-R or CD-RW and boot the system from it. The disk will ask whether you want retail or debug, so choose debug, and it'll wipe the drive and install the debug stuff we all know.
