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I Think I Bricked My Motherboard With a Softmod


emosun
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I have a v1 xbox that I softmodded with the unleash , ummmmm , dash or mod.....ok I'm a noob give me a break.

I already successfully modded my own v1 xbox with unleash , i even upgraded the hard drive then to a 300gb one and ripped some of my dvd games onto it. so at this point I felt invincible. I then tried to mod my friends v1 xbox doing the exact same thing.

Removed clock capacitor and cleaned
installed unleash
copied drive to a larger one
started loading dvd games

However I also tried downloading an emulator. I got it installed , sucessfully played an old diddy kong SNES game , but within the emulator there was a "reboot" option that I selected. The second It rebooted the console now is now in FRAG mode. there is no video output , it attempts to boot twice power cycling every second until the frag. It frags regardless of what drives are connected or unplugged. I ASUME the board has a problem with the firmware or bios and that it's my fault for trying the reboot feature in whatever emulator it was. (i should have just stuck with xbox games)

So now i'm in a pickle , I asume the board will need some sort of bios flash or perhaps even a chip installed to fix the bios which is beyond my skill level. AND OR...... if i could unlock either of the two drives that console has I could save the game saves and music the console had on it..... and just buy a new xbox.

Basically i need to solve the frag , or rescue the data. any ideas?

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Hey, so if your BIOS is hosed on a 1.0/1.1 Xbox you can do some very very easy solder work to actually switch BIOSes. 

 

The earlier versions of Xbox had 4x256KB BIOSes flashed onto the 1mb bios chip. 

https://www.xbox-hq.com/html/xbox-tutorials-226.html

 

Rip up an Ethernet cable and hit the underside of the board with it and a soldering iron, might be worth a shot. (Please don’t literally smack your board with an iron)

 

How do you know the board is a 1.0 though? Maybe post the serial number. 

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7 hours ago, nikeymikey said:

Can you boot from a disc? I presume you used a game to install the softmod? If you can boot from a disc they to reinstall the softmod maybe???

no theres a motherboard issue

2 hours ago, Ging3rguy said:

If you drop your original 8gb hdd in you should find you are back to before you installed your 300gb. Then just reformat your 300gb hdd.

no the motherboard doesnt even post

4 hours ago, Magicaldave said:

The earlier versions of Xbox had 4x256KB BIOSes flashed onto the 1mb bios chip. 

https://www.xbox-hq.com/html/xbox-tutorials-226.html

that looks intersting i'll try and give it a shot though I totally suck at soldering

4 hours ago, Magicaldave said:

How do you know the board is a 1.0 though? Maybe post the serial number. 

it's an early december 2001 xbox

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16 minutes ago, Ging3rguy said:

If you have tried booting the xbox with the original hdd in it and had no joy, I think you have another issue. What colour is the led when you try turning it on?

FRAG

Anyway i just tried the jumper wires and it's not working. Also tried replacing a cap i thought might be bad and still no dice.

At this point I'm just going to have to figure out how to unlock the hard drive and rescue the data , if anyone can help with that thats what i'd like to do

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Basically there are two ways to get the data if you’re not interested in the board. 

 

A) you backed up the EEPROM containing the HDD key, in which case you could just drop it in another box, use CHIMP261812 to unlock and re-lock the drive, then transfer. 

 

B) Your HDD key isn’t backed up anywhere. This would require using an EEPROM reader that either you made or bought, or you can just use a raspberry Pi. Not sure if this will work since the board FRAGs but the chip’s getting power, so...

http://icode4.coffee/?p=22 covers it. 

 

If you’re serious enough to go the B route for your data I’d suggest at least trying the coma console trick I mentioned earlier. If NOTHING else, it’s a good warmup for the slightly more difficult solder work of dumping the EEEPROM. 

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1 minute ago, Magicaldave said:

If you’re serious enough to go the B route for your data I’d suggest at least trying the coma console trick I mentioned earlier. If NOTHING else, it’s a good warmup for the slightly more difficult solder work of dumping the EEEPROM. 

I did try the coma console. neither combination of wires seemed to bring it back

(btw , if none of the combinations brought it back that would make me think the problem has nothing to do with the bios i suppose)

When i installed unleash i did select the backup eeprom option , but i dont know what it backs it up to or where it backs it up?

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1 hour ago, emosun said:



When i installed unleash i did select the backup eeprom option , but i dont know what it backs it up to or where it backs it up?

That option you’re referring to dumps the BIOS in the form of a file called EEPROM.bin which will usually be on the E:/ partition of the system’s hard drive. 

But your system is FRAGing, so it’s not gonna make it far enough to unlock the drive itself so you could make a hot swap work. 

 

At this point, your only option (strictly speaking outside of fixing the board itself) is to try and see if you might’ve FTP’ed over that file somewhere, somehow, and if not break out a raspberry pi. 

At this point the main board definitely has issues, if there’s nothing visible on it like extra solder or trace damage it may be a major component failure significant enough to warrant a new box. But that’s no joy for your saves unfortunately. 

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5 minutes ago, Magicaldave said:

it’s not gonna make it far enough to unlock the drive itself so you could make a hot swap work.  

so what can i do as far as a hotswap? i have other xboxs here that work

Edited by emosun
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Sorry, when re-reading that I realized it wasn’t super clear. 

Problem is because of the condition of the system it’s not going to bother even trying to unlock the hard drive, so hotswaps aren’t an option. 

Really stretching here, but, if you don’t have EEPROM.bin somewhere, maybe check for footage or photos taken during the mod. Maybe you’ll get lucky and have a screengrab of the HDD key. 

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2 minutes ago, Magicaldave said:

Sorry, when re-reading that I realized it wasn’t super clear. 

Problem is because of the condition of the system it’s not going to bother even trying to unlock the hard drive, so hotswaps aren’t an option. 

Really stretching here, but, if you don’t have EEPROM.bin somewhere, maybe check for footage or photos taken during the mod. Maybe you’ll get lucky and have a screengrab of the HDD key. 

I keep reading places that "xboxscene" and "teamassembly" is the password maybe?

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3 minutes ago, emosun said:

I keep reading places that "xboxscene" and "teamassembly" is the password maybe?

Well, certain softmods and apps are capable of “zeroizing” the hard drive password (32 zeroes) and can change it to “xboxscene” or “teamassembly” but this is almost always something you would have had to purposefully at some point. Normally the hard drive key is just 32 random alphanumeric characters.

 

It’s possible but doubtful. Do you know which softmod package you used? AID, HeXen, SID, Rocky5, etc?

 

if one of those is your password both options are available in CHIMP261812. You can try to unlock the drive using either password and chimp will let you know whether it works. 

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2 minutes ago, Ging3rguy said:

I know it’s a bit late now but if you have any other soft modded  boxes ftp the eeprom to your computer and keep them safe.

question

is there any way that filezilla would show what the drives password or eeprom key was if I still had it open from when i was connected to it?

I never closed filezilla from when the xbox was working , but is there any sort of log where filezilla needed the key to access the drive?

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9 minutes ago, emosun said:

question

is there any way that filezilla would show what the drives password or eeprom key was if I still had it open from when i was connected to it?

I never closed filezilla from when the xbox was working , but is there any sort of log where filezilla needed the key to access the drive?

I like your thinking! But no. The drive is unlocked as soon as the Xbox boots properly (your main problem) and never gets messed with in that way until reboot. Best case scenario, you might see WHERE the eeprom.bin was but you won’t actually get it .

I’d say it’s worth a shot trying to unlock the drive with one of the generic passwords you mentioned earlier in CHIMP. Nkpatcher is capable of changing HDD keys although i’m not certain that this is ever done automatically. Never used Ndure.

 

Worth a few minutes for your saves, for sure. 

 

Also what above poster said, back up and save every one of your xbox’s EEPROMs. Hell, better yet, use NKpatcher to wipe the hdd key entirely and be done with it. Just preventative maintenance though. Without those it can (obviously) be pretty hard to recover from a dead drive. 

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I noticed this screen from the youtube video

in the video he's locking the new hard drive and from what i can see the code appears to be unique , as in the code is pulled from the board or eeprom and isn't zeroed out or changed to something easy?

 

vlcsnap-2019-04-08-14h16m49s251.png

Edited by emosun
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10 minutes ago, emosun said:

I noticed this screen from the youtube video

in the video he's locking the new hard drive and from what i can see the code appears to be unique , as in the code is pulled from the board or eeprom and isn't zeroed out or changed to something easy?

 

vlcsnap-2019-04-08-14h16m49s251.png

Damn,  nice catch. So this softmod doesn’t make any changes to the key on its own. Expected, really. 

I’d still try the unlock but unless you zeroed out the key on your OWN system at some point and forgot it’s not gonna do anything. 

It’s mathematically possible to brute-force it, but.. yeah. I would get or find a Raspberry Pi somewhere. They’re like 20 bucks and actually make a nice complement to an Xbox anyway. (1080p!!!)

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3 minutes ago, Magicaldave said:

t’s mathematically possible to brute-force it, but.. yeah. I would get or find a Raspberry Pi somewhere. They’re like 20 bucks and actually make a nice complement to an Xbox anyway. (1080p!!!)

so what would the pi do? it would brute force it eventually?

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