[Picked up an Alpha II - Missing HDD, wondering about recovery]

6 hours ago, corona2222 said:

far out, it amazes me they just turn up as e-waste given how rare and sought after these are.

Yeah it was from the seattle area, just on ebay

[Picked up an Alpha II - Missing HDD, wondering about recovery]

On 5/27/2021 at 9:16 AM, xicat487 said:

I burned the May ISO 4 times with failure. My issue was old media and manufacturer of the disc. I used a Maxell DVD+RW burned at 2x through windows 7. Never had Windows 10 make the disc properly. The disc works but at times does not boot to the Xbox logo 1 in every 3 attempts. A fresh raw format of the HDD also helps. 

Thanks for this advice, I tried a new stack of DVD's (4x TDK) and worked first time. I guess the old CD-R's are shot.

Works like a charm thanks, https://imgur.com/a/opuUfAC

[Picked up an Alpha II - Missing HDD, wondering about recovery]

Tried a new disk drive, burned another July SDK image(ImgBurn), doesn't seem to want to boot... Checked for jumpers, they seem fine... Got a fresh CMOS battery... Seems like it's trying to read the CD but gives up and does a reset, after that shows the diskette error again.

Will try some more files later...

[Picked up an Alpha II - Missing HDD, wondering about recovery]

1 minute ago, KaosEngineer said:

Found another archive of XDKs and additional items.  Not all are for the Alpha kits but the actual devkits too - DVT3 etc.

https://mega.nz/folder/QtVxnAAa#r7KlTzzRbzruf6t048kmxQ

Yeah I saw that one on OG, where I got the may 2001 actually. Pretty sure it was just windows 10 being bad, i'll try ImgBurn next time, going to bed soon but i'll be back.

[Picked up an Alpha II - Missing HDD, wondering about recovery]

19 minutes ago, KaosEngineer said:

The 3521.1 archive includes two disc images - dot iso files.  I believe they are bootable discs that will install the software to the hard drive.  Make sure the motherboard's BIOS is set to boot from the CDROM before the hard drive.

Yeah tbh I had this May_2001.iso on a Cd disk already but it didn't seem to want to boot. (Invalid Boot Diskette - Insert BOOT diskette in A: which is just what it says when it doesn't have anything I guess). And yeah I disabled the other boot devices in the bios, I'm guessing I burnt it wrong(windows 10 iso burner sucks), maybe the cd-drive(although I hear it spinning up fine).

[Picked up an Alpha II - Missing HDD, wondering about recovery]

10 minutes ago, KaosEngineer said:

There are recovery disc images available. 

Yeah, I don't think the entire disc image is only 13MBs.  I don't think the AlphaRecsAndVGABios.rar (password: assemblergames) file is the recovery image.  It includes three other dot rar archives:

There's a May 2001 recovery image, May 2001 3521x1.rar (316.6 MBs), mentioned in the thread N64 Freak started - XBox Alpha Development Kit Build Log.

Dowload link: https://mega.nz/file/pgpgwQiI#EgikJlOdWUjNDY3TcKLEQSwvQOk93PkPo6iIfk2B7Gs

 

Yeah TY TY. I'll try to dd this over to the drive when I get some spare time.

[Picked up an Alpha II - Missing HDD, wondering about recovery]

Hey guys I got lucky recently and scored an Alpha II from an e-waste recycler.

Unfortunately the HDD was taken out, I've got a new one in there but I'm not sure if there's any full-recovery available.

I found N64 freak's build log so I'm feeling a bit dumb - but I don't think that the full recovery could be only 13MB right? Anyway, I guess what I'm asking is if anyone has any disk images they could share :).

 

Here's some pics from the seller, it has a different front panel(with lots of masking tape residue), but it's definitely real.