Search the Community

I've had a Xecuter 2.6 CE chip fitted Xbox v1.6 since around 2005, bought pre-installed and flashed with two banks each a custom Evox M8+ BIOS I've never needed/wanted to change. AFAIK the second BIOS is exactly the same but with the logo removed. All was working fine until last summer when I started to get occasional fragging on reboots/restarts. I found that if I swapped the banks it would usually boot correctly for weeks then suddenly the problem would reappear. I'd swap to the second bank and that would get it working again. So both BIOS are working but something else must be going on to cause this trouble. Fast forward to last weekend and after six months without a repeat the problem has reappeared but this time nothing I've tried to fix it has worked, at least not fully. I left it for several days and I was surprised to find on restart it booted as normal but when I used the IGR the fragging started again. I've dismantled the Xbox but haven't taken out the MB yet. The chip is surprisingly clean, almost dust free and seated firmly on the LPC. The top of MB soldered connections look perfect and are very firm and clean too. So maybe it is one of the underside connections. Is there anything with those connections I should be looking for that might cause this behaviour? It seems reasonable to think it could be a partially broken connection. Maybe a soldering point has dried out/cracked but if so why, until now, did swapping the BIOS banks get it working again? It is getting on for 19 years old and has had a lot of use and I'm worried that the chip itself might have developed some serious problem. Should also mention that with the chip off the Xbox boots without issue to an error 05 as you'd expect with an unlocked HDD. So that is more evidence it is just the chip.