My son noticed a neighbor was throwing away an xbox and shouted to me, "Daddy, he's throwing away an xbox," all the way across the courtyard and in the house I heard him. He's a loud 7 year old ;)
The neighbor said yeah it's broke. It stopped reading some games and then wouldn't start at all. It says to call customer service. He was kind enough to go inside and grab the video/power cables and let me have it, free. My son then followed him to his jeep and asked if he had controllers, because we'll need them once his dad fixes it.
It took more time than it should've -- Probably 8 hours of mucking around total. The first day I messed with it was useless. MechAssault didn't run. I thought an error 16 shouldn't stop that -- so I cleaned the optics on the DVD-ROM. Still no-go. So I move on and tried to run xboxhdm inside of qemu using a USB->IDE adapter with my laptop. Obviously the hdd had bad sectors, but I didn't put 2-and-2 together when I was getting "Read-only filesystem errors" that this was probably due to qemu, and the usual error would've been something in dmesg about bad sectors... ugh. I pulled out an old 40gig disk I had and started on that. But how to lock it?
So that night I borrowed a desktop PC from the junk closet at work, heh, and tried for an hour like that on the original disk. I was hoping eventually the files would be stored in a non-bad area just enough to get it to boot and get the EEPROM contents. Why'd I bother? I don't care to start building circuits, I haven't the tools, just a cheap 15W iron from RadioShack that isn't quite warm enough for most things... Well, I should've just went straight to building that EEPROM reader, cos it makes more sense and ended up taking not so long. Went rather well once I was able to get pins 1+6 from that DB-9 cable from being soldered together... =\
Here is how and here is another with comments. I spent $2.39 I believe at RadioShack, I only had $2.99 to my name. lol. I got a 4pk of 3.9kohm resistors, and the 5.1V zener diodes. Cut a cheaply made serial cable I use for firmware updates to my FTA satellite reciever (Don't worry, I have a better cable to replace it) for the DB-9 connector, and soldered the 2 points to the LPC connector and the rest was just quickly twisted together. The XBOX did not like this contraption. It turned blinking orange and rebooted but somewhere in there I was able to read this EEPROM onto my laptop with a Prolific USB->RS-232 adapter!
Okay, I kept the wires soldered on but disconnected the other ends from the zener/diode circuit just in case it wasn't a full dump. The last half was all FF's.. Didn't look nearly as populated as the example. So the XBOX kept doing the orange blinking LED / reboot deal! OMG I was about to panic. The comment poster on the second link said if it reboots rather than displays an error then you totally screwed something up! I was scared that I accidently overwrote the EEPROM with random shit. Went ahead and pulled the two wires, maybe the extra capacitance or something was messing up the signalling... It worked!
So having no desire to move shit around to get this file onto the desktop somehow, I sent the eeprom.bin to my FTP server, ran xboxhdm again on the borrowed desktop (it does dhcp!) and downloaded that file and locked the 40gig. Success! It didn't boot straight into a dashboard though, I got some other screen... I'm like -- what the hell -- it was MechAssault! Ha. That DVD-ROM does work. Even better :)
I now own 3 XBOX's. The first is softmod 120gig (long long ago), second is just softmod with MechAssault (never opened!!!), and this one which'll hold a few games on the disk, which is great since the kids scratch the DVD's very often and they left that 120gig one at grandma's during summer vacation -- 500 miles away. :(
Now populating the hdd is another story. Got excellent signal, but like 150KB/s transfer (across wifi), so ... UnleashX never seemed to be fast at FTP for me. Oh well.
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