Search the Community

Hi everyone. As i mentioned on my introductory post, I have an 1.4 OG Xbox that isn't quite right. I bought it knowing it didn't work, the seller told me a friend of his had replaced the caps and it worked for a while, but that now it's back to not working (when i bought it). After buying it and testing it, it did the classic fragging (reboot 3 times and then "Christmas lights"). When i opened the case, i found the that friend of his did replace some caps, the CPU/GPU ones, but left one without replacing that is arguably way more urgent to replace... the clock cap. Yes, it had already leak all over the place. I cleaned all the acid, removed the cap. Installed a ModXO... and the console boots up!.... but it does by itself, when plugging it to AC... that's not good. Also, pressing the eject button powered off the console. I latter discovered that this is a very known symptom of trace rot. A very good video about it is in the Retro Renegade Repairs channel, he explains in detail how to fix it. It is a matter of bridging the broken traces. If the damage is minimal, you can just bridge tiny gaps, but as i had the trace broken a few times along its length, i opted for just bridging the starting point and ending point of each broken trace with a very thin wire (i used an old IDE cable). This fixed the self powering issue and the eject button works! well, the button does, the tray doesn't open, but that was because the elastic band inside the tray was very old and loose. After cleaning and greasing the tray mechanism, i discovered that the DVD seems to be dead already. It is a Thomson, from what i read over the internet, those drives are the worst ones. So it appears as the previous owner had attempted a softmod, as the HDD already had games and a custom Dashboard. I cloned the Drive with CHIMP, and used XBTable Partitioner to make the clone a new drive, after configuring everything to my liking, i discovered a weird thing. When powering the console, there was no boot animation. Cerbios has a custom one, where is the same as the OG but with custom colors. The screen is just blank, nothing. If i power the console with the Eject button, the console boots in safe mode, skipping the boot animation and goes straight into XBM4G. Then i noticed something i didn't already, there was no sound at all. XBMC4G makes sounds when you move the cursor, but this was completely silent. When launching games, some would load, but then get stuck, and some would just reboot the console. This is where i realized something is still wrong with the console, but i don't really know what. I replaced EVERY capacitor on the board, to no avail. One thing that may have caused this, but i am not really sure, is that when i tried to put an 80 wire IDE cable, the console rebooted itself. The thing is, i don't really remember if the console did or didn't have audio before that. And if this has damaged any crucial part of the motherboard, like the MCPX. I don't think the issue is the RAM, as i read on-line that if it were the case, the console wouldn't even boot. Any ideas? thank you all