peevb Posted April 3, 2020 Report Share Posted April 3, 2020 (edited) Hi, Love this forum and got a lot of great info from here. Recently I dusted of my good old softmod and gave this all a go again after many years. I was able to tsop the xbox and install a larger harddisk. My friends picked up on the idea of having a xbox with emustation and asked me to build one for them as well. So I ended up buying and working on 6 xboxes and harddrives that all went trough their own struggle to get the job done but hey, I made it. Thing is though, at some point I used chimp to format a 500gb WD and it locked it by the end of the session in one of the xboxes. this drive ended up not being used and now I want to use it again but I do not know what xbox it's from. Being all wel prepped I did read all the eeproms from al the xboxes trough simple serial eeprom reader. Extracted them straight of the board with no issues but the sidenote is I never did with this 500gb WD hdd installed. And this is where my confusion is, because what I understand is the eeprom is xbox specific. And the harddrive password is generated trough the hdd serial number and model based on the eeprom. (Please correct me if I'm wrong). So all the eeproms I have when I read them in live info beta 3 show me other harddrives. So I connected the harddrive to my ide port refreshed the disk managment, it pops up under disk# and I try to select it in live info without any luck. I tried running chimp in order to unlock the hdd in the slave disk options with all the available eeproms but had no luck. Basically, and I'm sorry this is a long read, I'm trying to find a way to backwards engineer my hdd locking code with the 6 eeproms I have available that all state a different make/brand/sn hdd. Thank you in advance Pascal Edited April 3, 2020 by peevb Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SS_Dave Posted April 4, 2020 Report Share Posted April 4, 2020 Hello Pascal This is one reason I don't softmod and a hardmod/tsop flashed Xbox can work with the hard drive unlocked You could try some of the Master codes and they are case sensitive. WESTERN DIGITAL "WDCWDCWDCWDCWDCWDCWDCWDCWDCWDCWD” SEAGATE -> “Seagate” +25 spaces For xbox hdds try “XBOXSCENE” or “TEAMASSEMBLY” Other wise you have a paperweight I did read somewhere that Linux can maybe able wipe the entire drive and remove the locking at the same time. Cheers SS Dave Soft modding is like masturbating, It get's the job done but it's nothing like the real thing. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KaosEngineer Posted April 4, 2020 Report Share Posted April 4, 2020 The configuration EEPROM has no information about the hard drive installed in the Xbox it came from. Where are you seeing such information? LiveInfo shows the hard drive information for the hard drive attached to your old PC's IDE ports. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
peevb Posted April 4, 2020 Author Report Share Posted April 4, 2020 (edited) Thank you for your reply Dave. I'll give that a go. Hi KaosEngineer, Thank you for the information. The hdd locking code is harddisk specific as I understood, am I right? or does the hdd code that the eeprom carries not change with every new hdd that you install? This is where I get confused. once again I appreciate you're taking the time to reply. with kind regards Pascal Edited April 4, 2020 by peevb Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
peevb Posted April 4, 2020 Author Report Share Posted April 4, 2020 Thank you both for your great help. I ran all the eeproms again and was succesfull in unlocking the drive in Chimp. Take care, Pascal Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KaosEngineer Posted April 5, 2020 Report Share Posted April 5, 2020 From the factory, each Xbox has a unique HDDKey stored in the configuration EEPROM on the motherboard. This HDDKey along with each hard drive's Model number and serial number are used to generate a unique locking password for each hard drive locked for the Xbox it is installed in. Thus, if this hard drive was installed in a different Xbox, the password is different. A change in the HDDKey between the two Xboxes. And, the password generated for a different model and serial number hard drive will be different for a particular Xbox it is installed in. The Xbox's BIOS computes the correct password to unlock the hard drive each time the console boots. It reads the HDDKey from the configuration EEPROM and the hard drive's model and serial number to compute the correct password to send to the hard drive to unlock it to gain access to the files stored on it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
peevb Posted April 5, 2020 Author Report Share Posted April 5, 2020 Thank you for sharing this info. I really appreciate the help. I’m happy I was able to find the right eeprom.bin file to unlock the drive. thanks for shedding some light on this topic. With regards Pascal Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
eAkGBG Posted April 5, 2020 Report Share Posted April 5, 2020 I basically had this problem yesterday. I solved it with raspberry pi 3 and piprom. soldered 4 wires between pi and EEPROM that was already desoldered from the xbox that hard drive came from. 150usd SSD drive so kind wanted it working. then I read out the EEPROM with piprom. Moved it over with ftp to an modded xbox and used chimp. connected ssd as slave drive instead of DVD. Launched chimp from master drive. Then selected option unlock from file. And now that ssd is inserted and working in another Xbox. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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