Looking nice so far, I'll be following this as well.

Although I don't agree with piracy, I'd recommend modding it, swapping out the HDD, and backing your games up to it. That way you won't have to swap out discs often. How will the optical drive you're using handle being moved around by the way? It won't destroy the disc, will it?

I'm not modding it because I don't want to mod it. Good God, how many times do I have to say this...

I want it to be stock because it makes it more of a challenge. If I sell it, and the person that buys it wants otherwise, I'll be happy to provide said service, and I'm even going so far as to build the thing it so that it's totally reasonable to do.

I don't need any more people to tell me WHY I should mod it. I know all of the reasons why to do it, but it goes against the spirit of THIS project. Maybe some other time.

Furthermore, I already have all of my games backed up to my xbox, so making any further backups would be considered illegal, thus nullifying any reason to take the effort of modding in the first place.

I get the whole not modding it idea and respect that - but FWIW at some point in time you should probably run one of the save game mods and back up the EEPROM without modding the system. I'd hate to see this thing go through a complete build and then see the hard drive die on it.

Easy enough to pull the EEPROM after the HDD is dead, but considerably less time and effort to back it up beforehand.

You should just copy and paste every time somebody asks you if you're going to mod it.

If that happens, this will be built so that it takes relatively little effort to replace the board. This isn't some crazy board trimming experiment, you know.

anyway: Modchip. Problem solved. Yes, that takes away from the "It's not modded" thing, but still...

Also, I plan to softmod, steal the save-games and songs, and then remove mod anyway.

@Superben - I did mention the whole "not modding" thing in my post. I was merely indicating that the EEPROM should be backed up (which can be done without modding) so that WHEN (not if) the hard drive fails in the future, another hard drive can be used as a replacement.

That prevents having to throw away the entire board and etc. It's a simple enough solution, and can be done without the hard drive being present, but it is a lot easier to do it in advance.

@geb - you can back up music/data etc without softmodding as well. the gamesaves can put you into Evox and you can back up the data from there, and after a reboot return to an unmodded sate.

So... I turned it on today. It turned on. I'm not too surprised, but I thought people might care.

I could upload a picture, but it doesn't really show anything new... except for the 6pin connector I put on the power for testing...

First test with video. Everything seems to be displaying fine:


Now to figure out sound and override the open tray detection.

And by figure out sound, I mean I'm too lazy to do anything for it, but I know exactly what to do when I get off my bum and actually do something for it.

Nice....

Don't you have to pay for the plastic before they ship it to you?

why are you getting tray open errors? I thought you were sticking with the stock DVD drive...

The drive has 2 NO switches in it to detect when the tray is all the way opened and when it is all the way closed. When both are open, it assumes the drive is opening. Because I didn't have the board with these switches hooked up, the xbox assumed the drive to be in a state of opening up, or perpetually ejecting/retracting.

It isn't a difficult problem to solve, I just need to have my case built to really be able to do anything about it.

More recently, at MRTN, I managed to bust up my DVD motor, so I have a couple of other ones coming in the mail. When the parts get here, I plan to make a guide detailing what I am about to do, considering it can prove very useful for a number of projects on these forums.

Also, I had already given them the billing info, they just don't bill until they ship, so no, I don't have to pay until the plastic is on the truck.

looks really cool

Thats so cool i think ill do something similar to the one in my closet, One thing i dont understand how did you get the Xbox to accept the laptops LCD?
I also have the same model i think, latitude right?
Thanks for any help

I believe that it is an LCD panel of some sort, probably a monitor, not a laptop LCD.

I think he just used the Dell bezel from the laptop to save himself the headache of building a custom case for the LCD.

Nope, I used the screen from a Dell laptop.

All I had to do was find the name of the panel, check a list on ebay, and then order a part.

The screen aspect of this cost me about $40 for a controller from NJYTouch on ebay. You should look into it. Maybe I'll write up a guide soon.