Xbox repair - a story I would like to share :)

Includes PS2, Xbox 1, GameCube (but not the Phantom Game Console)

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Harlequin
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Joined:Fri Apr 25, 2008 1:20 am
Xbox repair - a story I would like to share :)

Post by Harlequin » Wed Jun 22, 2011 2:14 pm

hey guys, long time no post. I've just completed a bit of xbox repair and thought that i would pass this story along so that someone, somewhere would be able to learn from my own frustrations and maybe enjoy this short anecdote.

The patient in this case is my brother's softmodded xbox. I didn't softmod it. I don't know who did. I'm not sure why it was done the way it was, but it was a never before opened xbox so I'm presuming a game save exploit.

I went over to his place one day to see that he had retired his PS2 (his 3 year old son had deleted his softmod for it, so none of his backed up games worked, originals all destroyed by his 3 year old) and brought out his old xbox. I love the box so Halo was to ensue.

That's when I noticed the first odd thing. He didn't have to press a power button to turn it on. He just plugged it in and on she went. Lights came up, fan came on, and DVD eject worked. Power off? Nope. Power on? Nope. I forced it off through the softmod and then it wouldn't turn on at all. I volunteered to fix it at this time but he didn't want to be away from his source of entertainment for too long.

Well, five weeks later and the xbox no longer turned on at all. It did however spark out the power socket and smell like burning.... Ok, now can I fix it?

I take the beast home and crack it open first thing the next morning. It's dirty. It's dusty. I found the bodies of four animals inside. No joke, three spiders and one wood bug... cleaned out the cobwebs (literally) and noticed that the 1 Farad capacitor is leaking... not good... cleaned the area as best I could and plugged it back in. Still no dice.

Flipped the board over to investiage the cause of the auto-power on. Sure enough, along the front of the board was a trace that had deteriorated to nothing for about 2 mm. The multimeter confirmed that it was no longer in tact. I had to tag a test point (easy) and a via (hard). The via wouldn't let me feed any wire through it either so it was a real pain. In the end I dabbed a too big glob of solder on the end and just heated it up lying it alongside the via. It connected, I taped it down and we moved on together.

Next, I pulled out the power supply. The box still wouldn't turn on and I figured it might have killed the PSU. Pull it out and i can see a scorched and solder free area right next to one of the power prongs. I clean the area as best i can with alcohol, and then scrape it with a razor to clean it up some more. Switch my iron from 15 w to 30 w and place the tip on the exposed metal. Add solder. Lots of solder. Never in my life have I added so much. But the guide I read said to give it a lot, so I did. solid connection. screwed PSU back into place. Mobo goes into case (no screws) and I run a test power up. No more auto-power on, no more sparks, powers on button press. Powers off on button press.

Well, I've got the iron hot, the board out of the box and it's capable of a tsop flash.... used a new technique to tag the tsop points (long length of wire with a slight "L" shape at the end) and managed to tag both points in about a second. Cut off the excess wire, tested the points via alt points and everything seemed good.

Downloaded Heimlen's xbox utility Cd (called Hexen) as it had a winbond flashing tool. burnt the disc, flashed the firmware and we were up and running INd 5003 without a hitch.. and then the hitch came...

For whatever reason I have never had success when xboxes use DHCP for their IP address. Never.. So I had to go through a rather painful process after the flash. IND wasn't configured to run from the softmod's dash, so it was booting... something... other than that. I ended up having to use the hexen disk to get into the admin tools to browse the hard drive to launch XBMC to get to the C drive and get to IND's config file. believe it or not, it took a lot more work than that summary to get to that point.

Another thing that drove me nuts was that there is almost no support for IND 5003. It's the go-to bios for all tsop 1.2-1.5 and no one ever bothered to put together a readme for it, at least not one that still exists. I'll save you some frustration if you use this bios. When it lists the dashes to boot from, it uses linux listings for partitions. Partions start at Zero not at One. I kept pointing and repointing the bios to the wrong drive for it's dash until i clued in to this little tidbit. Once I had it reliably booting xbmc, I went about cleaning up the C drive. There was a lot of garbage on it, and I still have yet to completely clean it up. I then switched the dash to Evox with XBMC as an app. I prefer the lay out and they'll have to get used to it. I also formatted the unused 2 gigs on the HDD that the box had. That gave room for additional tools and games and etc. This is important when you have a now 4 year old who likes to play with disks.

I was a little confused about the softmod, it was done quite differently than what I remember of them. I was intrigued by IND as I had never used it before, and prefer x2 5035 over it.

Long story short, the dead xbox that arrived is now not only alive, but working correctly, and has 2 gigs of additional data storage and a new TSOP. Job well done.

feedback and questions are welcome

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Joes2Silly
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Re: Xbox repair - a story I would like to share :)

Post by Joes2Silly » Wed Jun 22, 2011 4:35 pm

Did you think about upgrading his hard drive? If so he could probably back up his entire xbox game library just in case his disks get destroyed. And now that you are running iND bios you can just drop a new hard drive in and not even have to lock it!
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Harlequin
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Re: Xbox repair - a story I would like to share :)

Post by Harlequin » Fri Jun 24, 2011 9:53 pm

Yeah I considered putting in a bigger HDD, but then I'd have to do the back up and etc. There is a stupid amount of work for doing it that I just didn't want to bother with. Maybe at a later point in time I'll bump it up. He doesn't have a lot of games right now anyways, mostly playing emulators and what not, but I do like the idea of dumping all games onto the HDD and playing them directly from that. It's something I am likely to do with my other brother's xbox as he has the never opening Samsung that I have never been able to figure out how to fix. I think it's a problem with the magnet or a belt, when there is a DVD/CD in the drive it opens and closes fine. Without a disk, it can't physically open :S

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