Cerbios hangs on boot with newly installed 128mb upgrade

[Zagman]

Hi All, Today I just finished upgrading my 1.4 board with an X3 as the chip to 128mb of ram. The upgrade went great no issues with a hot air rework station. I flashed Xblast OS to one of the banks of the X3 and tested each chip as it was installed, I got a"success" on all 4 chips. Put the board back in and hooked it up, booted into X3 Config Live and the X3 recognizes 128mb of ram. Switched banks to the latest Cerbios release (2.4.1) and the box just hangs at the Cerbios Logo (not the dogs, I know about the issue). Any suggestions on this situation? 

I tried the 2.3.1 and got the same thing. I tried booting into Cerbios Safe mode with eject and got a black screen (no logo). I tried 2.3.1 udma 2-5. No luck 

Thanks for your replies,

Zagman 

 

[NokSueCow]

Do you have another xbox to verify your Cerbios install boots? What are your dash paths on the ini? The dash paths match what's installed?

[Zagman]

Cerbios was booting fine on this Xbox. The .ini file has not been modified before the ram upgrade. The Xbox was booting right into xbox4gamers dash. The only thing that has changed is the ram from 64mb to 128mb.

[Zagman]

So I haven't figured it out yet... This is what i tried....Swapped out the StarTech Adapter with a good generic adapter, no difference....Swapped out the 80 wire 40 pin ribbon cable, no difference.....Reflashed a bank with an older version of Cerbios (2.21), It boots to the xbox default dash. I can FTP into the drive and all the partitions are intact. So the drive is not an issue. I've got the .ini file to default to xbox4gamers on my E: drive and it doesn't initialize. I've tried UDMA 2-6 and no go. I didn't think that Cerbios is that wonky.

Zagman

[NokSueCow]

You may have more luck in the Cerbios channel of the xbox scene discord. I've never added ram myself. Have you tried removing the ini and see if it boots with the bios config instead?

[bacus]

In this reddit thread, the guy said he had to use an even older Cerbios (v2.0.3r). Maybe try that?

[nikeymikey]

It seems that there is a bit of a compatibility issue with the X3, 128mb and Cerbios in the newer revisions. I would be interesting to see if anyone with other chips (Xenium etc) and 128mb have any similar issues.

Edit- This has been debunked by @Dempsey_86 who has successfully used the latest Cerbios on an X3 with 128mb installed. 

[lopenator]

2 hours ago, nikeymikey said:

It seems that there is a bit of a compatibility issue with the X3, 128mb and Cerbios in the newer revisions. I would be interesting to see if anyone with other chips (Xenium etc) and 128mb have any similar issues. 

I have xenium and 128 with cerbios without issue

[nikeymikey]

1 minute ago, lopenator said:

I have xenium and 128 with cerbios without issue

Are you using latest revision? 

[lopenator]

yes. maybe one of the ram chips are acting weird. May need to replace them with others. I've had an issue with ram one time. xblastos was saying chips were successful and it worked for a few weeks. One day I tried to play H2 and the xbox stayed in a coma state. I put my xblastos chip back on and all ram was successful. I removed the 4 ram and it worked. Replaced them with different ram and it works. Sometimes ram can go bad you don't know which one it is.

Edited August 14 by lopenator

[gehx]

1 hour ago, lopenator said:

I have xenium and 128 with cerbios without issue

Same here. Xenium; 128MB, latest version of Cerbios.  No issues.

[Zagman]

Tried flashing Cerbios V2.0.2R. no go. With and without a .ini file

[Dempsey_86]

9 hours ago, nikeymikey said:

It seems that there is a bit of a compatibility issue with the X3, 128mb and Cerbios in the newer revisions. I would be interesting to see if anyone with other chips (Xenium etc) and 128mb have any similar issues. 

Just to rule this out, I booted my X3cp v1.4 128mb ram console with cerbios 2.4.1 beta and boots fine.

[nikeymikey]

1 minute ago, Dempsey_86 said:

Just to rule this out, I booted my X3cp v1.4 128mb ram console with cerbios 2.4.1 beta and boots fine.

Ok that confirms that op has a prob with his ram install then. I would have tested it myself but I sold my last x3 console a short while ago. 

[Dempsey_86]

4 minutes ago, nikeymikey said:

Ok that confirms that op has a prob with his ram install then. I would have tested it myself but I sold my last x3 console a short while ago. 

I know, you could ask more for it lol

[Zagman]

What a PITA. The ram upgrade went smoothly and every indication points to success. I can boot into evox dash and when I try to play a game out of that dash it just reboots back to X3 Config Live. The last thing I want to do is remove this ram. Granted it's only cost very little, plus time and effort, but I can never catch a a break. I'll look at the soldering closer, but it looks pretty good already. Can a faulty chip even give a positive test result? I got the ram from OGXStore.com

[lopenator]

1 hour ago, Zagman said:

What a PITA. The ram upgrade went smoothly and every indication points to success. I can boot into evox dash and when I try to play a game out of that dash it just reboots back to X3 Config Live. The last thing I want to do is remove this ram. Granted it's only cost very little, plus time and effort, but I can never catch a a break. I'll look at the soldering closer, but it looks pretty good already. Can a faulty chip even give a positive test result? I got the ram from OGXStore.com

yes it can and it has

Edited August 14 by lopenator

[nikeymikey]

As it goes I did actually run Cerbios on my X3, 128mb console before I sold it so that’s another confirmed case of it working on an X3 without issue. 

[Dempsey_86]

11 hours ago, Zagman said:

What a PITA. The ram upgrade went smoothly and every indication points to success. I can boot into evox dash and when I try to play a game out of that dash it just reboots back to X3 Config Live. The last thing I want to do is remove this ram. Granted it's only cost very little, plus time and effort, but I can never catch a a break. I'll look at the soldering closer, but it looks pretty good already. Can a faulty chip even give a positive test result? I got the ram from OGXStore.com

I had a board once that I upgraded, the test also showed fine, the console even booted cerbios. When I tried to play a game sometimes it froze or when it played I had weard artefacts on screen. Well that was because a bridge on one of the ram legs. The bridge was not really visible for me at first, but after reflowing the legs on chip 4 the problem went away.

[Zagman]

Thanks for the reply...I've got the board out and looking over the soldering , it looks ok, one chip looks a bit crooked...but like you mentioned about undetected bridges, I'll reflow the chip(s) and recheck with Xblast. I took my time installing this ram and thought it was a decent job. The last thing I want to do is buy more ram and then troubleshoot what's already installed.

[trencherfield]

All I can tell you is that ram chips have a threshold to 'hot air' installs. PDF's will usually state flow soldering and a max temp.
It's for these reasons I never use hot air on them. Honestly, they are not hard to hand solder in nicely with perfect joints and don't take long to do. I don't even bother with the ram test, I always install the four then assemble I'm that confident with them.

Other issue is the quality of the ram in the first instance. One rouge module will cause issues. It is known for them to pass ram test as well in this state. Buy from the best seller with feedback, not the cheapest.

[Zagman]

So i reached out to the RAM seller and it was suggested I try another HDD on the Xbox. So I swapped out the 2tb HDD that's currently installed and put back the 120gb IDE HDD I had for years in there. The IDE drive has no issues, I just wanted a huge drive for lots of content. The Xbox boots up no problem into Cerbios. I installed xbmc4gamers and updated the artwork, dash recognizes the 128mb of ram and the advanced artwork setting is enabled. So my issue is with the 2tb SATA HDD. 

  The 2tb HDD had no issues before the ram upgrade. The only thing that may be an issue is that I formatted the E: partition from 5gb to 30gb to accommodate DLC content for the games installed on the HDD. I know that it's not smart to mess with the stock partition sizes. The drive had no issues previously.

  Does anyone know if having a oversized E: drive contribute to an issue such as this? I did notice that the xbox takes about up to 30 seconds to boot into X3 Config Live with both StarTech and generic IDE/SATA adapters and different 80 wire ribbon cables. When I connect the IDE drive, the X3 boots quickly to X3CL. 

Now that the RAM is not an issue, any suggestions on the drive configuration? 

Zagman

[nikeymikey]

8 hours ago, Zagman said:

So i reached out to the RAM seller and it was suggested I try another HDD on the Xbox. So I swapped out the 2tb HDD that's currently installed and put back the 120gb IDE HDD I had for years in there. The IDE drive has no issues, I just wanted a huge drive for lots of content. The Xbox boots up no problem into Cerbios. I installed xbmc4gamers and updated the artwork, dash recognizes the 128mb of ram and the advanced artwork setting is enabled. So my issue is with the 2tb SATA HDD. 

  The 2tb HDD had no issues before the ram upgrade. The only thing that may be an issue is that I formatted the E: partition from 5gb to 30gb to accommodate DLC content for the games installed on the HDD. I know that it's not smart to mess with the stock partition sizes. The drive had no issues previously.

  Does anyone know if having a oversized E: drive contribute to an issue such as this? I did notice that the xbox takes about up to 30 seconds to boot into X3 Config Live with both StarTech and generic IDE/SATA adapters and different 80 wire ribbon cables. When I connect the IDE drive, the X3 boots quickly to X3CL. 

Now that the RAM is not an issue, any suggestions on the drive configuration? 

Zagman

I had issues with an enlarged E partition. Reformatted back to stock size and never looked back.  I only install DLC as and when I need it now. Its all on the XBMC4gamers downloader so super easy to access when you want it anyway. I think @Rocky5 also adds any new stuff that's found and catalogued via XCAT thanks to @Harcroft and the team.

[Dempsey_86]

1 hour ago, nikeymikey said:

I had issues with an enlarged E partition. Reformatted back to stock size and never looked back.

What kind of issues did you have?

[nikeymikey]

2 hours ago, Dempsey_86 said:

What kind of issues did you have?

Just general weirdness tbf, some games wouldn't save or read save games and iirc some older dashboards didnt like it either. This was quite a few years back. I never tried it again so wouldn't know if anything has changed in that regard.

I am curios if the Cerbios dual hdd support will help out in that are a tho.. Having a second 500gb hdd just for another E partition would be the golden bullet solution. In fact I have a 500gb hdd set up and formatted as one huge E drive ready to when the new Cerbios is released and support is added to XBMC4Gamers....