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Reviving My Old Xbox (V1.0) – Fragging Issues and Error Screen


Emptyworks
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I recently dug up my old OG Xbox (V1.0) from my parents' basement. It's been sitting for a while, and when I got to it, it was pretty rusted. Right now, it frags most of the time, cycling twice before flashing red and green, but occasionally it boots to an error screen. I'm testing without the disc drive or hard drive connected, so I think the error might be related to that.  I haven't managed to get it to boot with the disc drive/HD connected but I'm not sure if that's relevant or just coincidence. 

It's stock, it hasn't been soft/hard modded and I'm the first person to open it.

I’ve done a few console mods and handheld builds before, but this is my first time working on an Xbox. Any help would be really appreciated!

Here’s what I’ve tried so far:

  • Cleaned off as much rust as possible and repainted the metal case. I made sure to file off the paint on the contact points and confirmed continuity from the motherboard and PSU to the case.
  • Removed the clock capacitor. There was a lot of gunk around it, but I didn’t spot any bulging or visible damage on the other caps. I reflowed a few of the components nearby that didn't look nice. I cleaned the area with vinegar and IPA. I also ordered a Console5 cap kit, which should arrive in a few days.
  • Found a broken trace on the bottom of the board using this guide (though it's for a 1.1): Trace Corrosion Fix. Couldn't see the break, but my multimeter showed no contact between the points, so I ran a jumper wire. No power button issues so far, so not sure if it’s related to the fragging.
  • Reflowed the solder points on the PSU connector for the power cord.
  • Removed the CPU and GPU heatsinks, cleaned them, and applied new thermal compound.
  • Checked the LPC voltages, and they seem normal according to this LPC Voltage Guide. I’m getting 5.1V and 3.3V.
  • Tried the "3 pin hack" as a long shot in case it was a bad BIOS, but it didn’t seem to help. As recommended in this thread

Once the cap kit arrives, I plan to swap out the capacitors, but I’m not sure what else to try after that. I haven’t spotted anything else visually wrong but I'm hoping someone more experienced will see something I can't.

Thanks again.

Google Photo Album  with more pictures

CasePaint.jpg

BrokenTrace.jpg

PXL_20250110_202022759.jpg

PXL_20250111_055848396.jpg

PXL_20250119_081225959.jpg

PXL_20250119_080913127.jpg

Edited by Emptyworks
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55 minutes ago, Emptyworks said:

Right now, it frags most of the time, cycling twice before flashing red and green, but occasionally it boots to an error screen. I'm testing without the disc drive or hard drive connected, so I think the error might be related to that.  I haven't managed to get it to boot with the disc drive/HD connected but I'm not sure if that's relevant or just coincidence. 

A stock Xbox needs both drives attached as it looks at the DVD drive for a game disk to boot then looks at the Hard Drive to load the MS dash.

It's fragging because there is nothing to load, It is probably flashing one of the patterns below.

814654469_Xboxerrorleds.jpg.4a41baa066368586bceb1b8b1c579850.jpg

 

While the MB is out I would add the 2 links needed to re-flash the BIOS chip.

 

points10.jpg

 

 

Cheers

SS Dave


Soft modding is like masturbating, It gets the job done but it's nothing like the real thing.

 

 

 

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Yeah, it flashes "50% Green, 50% Red" when it gets stuck in the boot loop or reaches the error screen. I was hoping to get it to consistently reach the error screen without the drives, but I’ll try reconnecting them to see if that helps.

I’ll go ahead and bridge those traces and report back.  I still have one of the wires in from the "3 pin hack" experiment I guess I'll remove that for now since it didn't seem to change anything.

Thanks, Dave! 

PXL_20250119_220649785.jpg

Edited by Emptyworks
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I bridged the two sets of traces and reassembled the Xbox with the disc drive and hard drive connected. I also removed the red jumper wire I had in the previous image.

Unfortunately, it’s still fragging. I haven’t been able to boot successfully or even reach the error screen I had before. When I push the power button it tries to boot up twice before finally staying on with flashing red+green lights. There's no video output.

Also now the disc drive isn’t opening when I press the eject button. I hear it spin up when I press the button. That's a new issue, it worked fine a few days ago.

 

Bridged.png

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2 hours ago, Emptyworks said:

I bridged the two sets of traces and reassembled the Xbox with the disc drive and hard drive connected

All the links are for is to enable the writing to the BIOS chip later.

2 hours ago, Emptyworks said:

Also now the disc drive isn’t opening when I press the eject button. I hear it spin up when I press the button. That's a new issue, it worked fine a few days ago.

My money is on the tray load belt under the front of the DVD tray is loose.

 

When your testing are you connecting the small board that connects to the control ports?

 

Cheers

SS Dave


Soft modding is like masturbating, It gets the job done but it's nothing like the real thing

 

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As its a V1 its probably a Thompson drive and the belts on these seem to be more prone to retirement than the others. 

If you can power it up via the eject button and the draw open without juddering or sticking then the belt should be ok. 

Double check your soldering with a multimeter just to make sure its correct.

Volt check the out puts on the PSU,  be careful with the mains on as theres a few points on the PSU which are at mains potential and a few others that can equally give you a sizeable whack.

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Ya, it's a Thompson drive. So I was about to start working on it tonight but something strange happened. When I power up the Xbox and unplug the IDE cable from the disc drive, it starts working properly, opening and closing as it should with the eject button. However when I plug the IDE cable back in it just makes a spinning noise and stays shut when I press the eject button. I have no clue what's going on with that (maybe a bad IDE cable?).  If I can get this working I'd like to hard mod it anyway so I'm not too concerned with the disc drive.

I still think the bigger issue for me is how it's booting so inconsistently, mostly bootlooping. The capacitor kit should arrive tomorrow I'm really hoping that helps.  I don't have a way to test capacitance on my multi meter but I probably need to research a bit more.  I think I can at least pull a few and see if they are holding a charge.

20 hours ago, SS_Dave said:

All the links are for is to enable the writing to the BIOS chip later.

Oh that's cool.
 

8 hours ago, big F said:

Volt check the out puts on the PSU,  be careful with the mains on as theres a few points on the PSU which are at mains potential and a few others that can equally give you a sizeable whack.

Would the voltages( 5.1V + 3.3V) I'm reading from the LPC indicate that the PSU is good?

DriveOpen.jpg

Edited by Emptyworks
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The voltages are with in tolerance.  From what you have said it sounds like the board on the DVD drive has a fault.  Its one of those times where a spare drive might be the answer as repairing those boards can be a pain in ass.

if you are able to install a mod chip that will help you with booting without the dvd to at least test the rest of the system. Normally I would say just mod the on board chip but as you cant boot etc thats going to be harder than fitting a cheap mod chip. 

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1 hour ago, Emptyworks said:

Ya, it's a Thompson drive. So I was about to start working on it tonight but something strange happened. When I power up the Xbox and unplug the IDE cable from the disc drive, it starts working properly, opening and closing as it should with the eject button. However when I plug the IDE cable back in it just makes a spinning noise and stays shut when I press the eject button. I have no clue what's going on with that (maybe a bad IDE cable?).  If I can get this working I'd like to hard mod it anyway so I'm not too concerned with the disc drive.

I still think the bigger issue for me is how it's booting so inconsistently, mostly bootlooping. The capacitor kit should arrive tomorrow I'm really hoping that helps.  I don't have a way to test capacitance on my multi meter but I probably need to research a bit more.  I think I can at least pull a few and see if they are holding a charge.

Oh that's cool.
 

Would the voltages( 5.1V + 3.3V) I'm reading from the LPC indicate that the PSU is good?

DriveOpen.jpg

If I remember correctly all the cap replacements on the Thompson are small radial caps as compared to the other models which have mostly surface mount. Be sure to use a good bit of flux. Some of those are temperamental coming loose. Temperamental like everything else on the Thompson. Lol

Just throwing this out there but have you tried another ide cable just for grins. Odds are the short is on the dvd internal pcb but it just popped in my head as something quick and easy to test. 

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Not good.

It's fixable if you have the experience and it may only be a couple of tracks, You need to test each trace with a ohms meter and see how many are cut.

 

AP1GczMaTKGWGrGk3dX-1oYCOp1jiRTiGLfWEKpAMOoLiXUlZ-K1nsseNW4NmsPbxWuAMtYE8K1eXmyXX9XSR1SFNp_lRRtOKEKyraZzlYgBgccaQ6istWmXdEbLzC0Z2MT2k6MCWOMgz-rCClK7ugHlzpEx=w457-h607-s-no-gm?authuser=0

 

Cheers

SS Dave


Soft modding is like masturbating, It gets the job done but it's nothing like the real thing

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1 hour ago, FrostyMaGee said:

Just throwing this out there but have you tried another ide cable just for grins. Odds are the short is on the dvd internal pcb but it just popped in my head as something quick and easy to test. 

That's a good idea. I’ll check if I have an extra cable.  If not maybe I can order one to test with.

2 hours ago, big F said:

 Its one of those times where a spare drive might be the answer as repairing those boards can be a pain in ass.

Yeah unfortunately, I don’t have an extra disc drive.

I did find a scratch on the traces right next to the IDE port. The one on the right doesn’t seem too deep, but I think I can see some exposed copper on the smaller scratch on the left. I may need to scrape away some of the solder mask to check if it’s broken. I haven’t been able to figure out which pin it leads to yet. It looks like its 21,2,22 or 3 but it's so small I can't get my multi meter probe on it.

IDE_PortScratch.jpg

IDE_Port.jpg

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Hehe Dave you're too quick. 

I've never repaired a trace before but I've seen it done on youtube.
 

21 minutes ago, SS_Dave said:

You need to test each trace with a ohms meter and see how many are cut.

Do you know of any documentation showing where those traces should lead? I tried to investigate myself but couldn't find where they all ended.

Edited by Emptyworks
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Get yourself a fibre glass pen and some isopropyl (rubbing alcohol) clean the mask off the area and you should be able to see if the traces are broken. Once ok (fixed or otherwise) coat them over with some nail polish, colour is your choice. That will seal them and prevent rusting.

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Caps arrived!

I never heard of a fiberglass pen before but it looks cool. I ordered one. I was going to scrape the solder mask off with an xacto knife, but this seems way less risky for me to avoid cutting any more traces.

Edited by Emptyworks
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6 hours ago, Emptyworks said:

Caps arrived!

I never heard of a fiberglass pen before but it looks cool. I ordered one. I was going to scrape the solder mask off with an xacto knife, but this seems way less risky for me to avoid cutting any more traces.

Make sure you use it with a glove on your hand. Those little fibres get everywhere and are a pain to get off of your skin. 

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The fiberglass pen was such a W, great advice. Made the whole process easy.

Good news: all the traces look intact! I did continuity tests and everything checks out. I even scraped another trace that looked sketchy, but it turned out fine too.

I started recapping last night and am almost halfway done now. The red dots are the old caps. I tried booting the Xbox, and luckily, no cap pops—so at least the caps I’ve installed so far are in correctly. But the bad news is the Xbox is still stuck in a boot loop (fragging).

I did notice some gunk under a few caps near the clock cap. Not sure if they were leaking or maybe just residue from the clock cap itself.

Not really sure what my next move should be yet. For now, I’m planning to keep working on the recap and looking for anymore broken traces. Fingers crossed something clicks!

Back_Trace.jpg

IDE_Traces.jpg

PXL_20250123_042958254.jpg

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If it's still FRAG'd after all this repair, it could be a failed TSOP chip or a failed EEPROM. Dump the EEPROM as soon as you can.

If the TSOP has failed, hardmodding will fix it. If the EEPROM is failing, you should be able to flash a replacement, as long as you can dump the file.

Edited by Sam Houston
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I had an eprom fail years back, bought a lead to pull the eproms without the need to remove them from the board.  Was able to pull image from another board that was faulty and reprogram the one that dropped its programing.

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I need to do some reading to get up to speed on what the TSOP and EEPROM actually do and what’s necessary if my plan is to use a mod chip and a new hard drive.

I do have a Pico Mini, and I was planning to try the ModXO mod after getting this set up. Looking at the project’s GitHub, it looks like I already have everything I need to give it a shot. The software stuff looks a bit crazy at first glance but I'm sure I can figure it out. Would ModXO work or do I need a different one? Also what if I can't Dump the EEPROM?

I didn’t make much progress on the caps last night since I had some irl work stuff to take care of but I’m planning to get some xbox time in tonight.

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It's alive!!

I popped in the Pico tonight, and it booted up right away! I don't have a controller so I can't navigate the menu yet. I'll have to order one and In the meantime, I'll finish replacing the caps, re-cover those traces I exposed,  and I want to do a nicer job installing modchip.  I also need to do some reading on what I need to add a new hard drive.

I guess this means it was my TSOP chip that was dead right?

Thank you so much, I really appreciate everyone's help!

OhYa.jpg

TempMod.jpg

Edited by Emptyworks
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Looks like the TSOP is dud or more likely blank,  could be that way after the previous owner tried to flash it maybe.   Once you are up and running you could try and flash the on board chip and see if it takes a bios. That will prove one way or the other.

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