phrunt

Got it all sorted, Patched the firmware on the WD Green with wdidle3, thanks

Could the NoDVD bios problem be related to the master/slave/cable select option and cable position. With both drives connected it's seeing them fine, one drive it's hanging.

These worked for me, and they have the master/slave selection too https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32917345276.html?spm=a2g0o.productlist.0.0.493a5a43PUbnig&algo_pvid=153b9979-d26d-4af7-8925-5f3b3df54316&algo_exp_id=153b9979-d26d-4af7-8925-5f3b3df54316-1&pdp_ext_f={"sku_id"%3A"66005890060"}

You have to be a bit careful with some SSD's especially cheap ones, put your Xbox away in a cupboard for a year, come back to it and your data is gone. I've had it happen myself as I filled an SSD with movies for using in my Caravan, didn't use the Caravan for a year come back and the external SSD was blank, no partition nothing, like a new unpartitioned/unformatted drive. It was an A-Data SSD. It seems a controversial topic with some saying it happens others saying it doesn't or takes many years, for me... it did and in under 12 months. I've put my XBoxs away for 5 or more years with hard drives, fire them up and all is good. Since then I don't trust SSD's for powered off long term storage.

Well, as always you guys were awesome, it all went to plan. I changed the bad caps with success, no issues at all really as it was easier than I thought it'd be. The only thing that went wrong is I'd knocked off a wire from my mod chip in the process, luckily I took some photos during the process and I was able to put the wire back where it fell off. The Xbox is all up and running now with it's new caps. The other foolish heart stopping thing I did was had the TV on the wrong input when I turned the Xbox on so I had no signal, it gave me a heart attack I noticed when the Xbox booted up and the light changed to Red that I have it set to so I knew the Xbox had booted then I quickly worked out my mistake. This photo was once I'd take the board out before I stated the job, the photo that saved me with the mod chip wire falling off. I know it's controversial about changing the thermal paste but I did it to both the GPU and CPU while I was in there, just used the heat gun on my soldering station to put a bit of heat on the heat sinks so they came off very easily and scraped the old thermal paste off with a credit card and some pure alcohol then put Arctic silver on there. It sure didn't hurt, my temps are nice. The caps had quite obvious damage on top.

Thanks for the information. Hopefully they work OK on it.

Thanks, so I had it wrong, lucky I didn't proceed without checking OK so you've marked the negative side in black and I align that with the negative side which is the side with the little line on the silver standard caps. I bought some flux so I'll use your trick there. Thanks for the help.

I've managed to get some capacitors I think will be suitable for my Xbox, is anyone able to confirm they are the right sort Here are my old bad ones and the new ones The shop they came from said they were 1500uF 6.3V NICHICON HE Series 10x20mm Extremely Low Impedance Aluminum Electrolytic Capacitors Any advice appreciated before I go attempting to replace capacitors for the first time I assume the original Xbox ones have that line on the top of one side to show the negative side? and I put the new capacitor oriented with the side with the line through the same hole? And I guess the circled bit on this new capacitor is the line?

Sounds good to me! Did you power off and on before running XB Partitioner to check for the ER on the final time before copying all your stuff on again?

yep, same problem I had the first time I did it years ago, you need to format your hard drive twice in XP Partitioner 1.3, the first time make the size a bit smaller than the available space on both partitions, then power off and on the Xbox and format it again this time to the full size and bingo you're off. Problem has been around since the start of time. Also make sure you've got 64kb cluster size. At the moment if you go into XB Partitioner as sweetdarkdestiny said, you'll have ER on the partitions.

Yes, the HDD was unlocked, I'm not a fan of locking hard drives as I see no point now XBox live is dead. I'd rather the drive unlocked so if the Xbox dies I can transplant it into another Xbox easily as many hours of work goes into getting my Xbox drives how I like them with all the stuff on them. All my problems are solved now by making the chip be on all the time.

This conductive shielding paint works too, I knew a guy that flashed a crazy amount of xboxs using it years ago, one bottle of it lasted him forever https://www.guitaraust.com.au/body/electronics/shielding-paint.html

Can you ftp the stock dash over to C, it might be missing some files. You're very close now, happy to see you've almost got it done.

Also, you are using an 80 wire IDE cable aren't you? I've had some weird problems in the past like this when using the standard cable. As soon as the 80 wire cable goes on things come to life.

awesome news, I'll put a 3tb in my next Xbox to get that little bit of extra space as my Xbox's are full already so I could use the extra space.