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Repairing XBox Debug Kit


GoTeamScotch
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I have a broken debug kit Xbox that I'm hoping to salvage and get working again and could use some pointers. It starts to boot up but hangs at the X screen during bootup (no Microsoft logo).

There is some trace-rot and corrosion present on the board, and I'm hoping it's not bad enough to be causing these issues. The clock capacitor was leaking but it was very minor.

e00SGDfl.jpg

High-res photos of the board: https://imgur.com/a/sESsyvi

There's also a bodge-job done to the underside of the board, which I'm not sure what it does.

spacer.png

The orange D0 wire was added by me. The thermal tape was there when I got it.

The hard drive does not make any sound at all, so I hooked the HDD up to a PC and my PC couldn't read it (still no spin-up or reading sounds coming from the drive). I suspect that the drive may be broken. I swapped in a similar model HDD's logic board (first part of model was the same, last part was slightly different) and then the drive spun-up, but was clicking ('click of death' sound), but I'm not sure if this is from the drive being busted or from it being the wrong logic board.

I burned 5849_Recovery to a disc, swapped in a different (unlocked) Xbox HDD and tried to boot from the disc and it hung at the same spot in the bootup process. I tried a different DVD drive too just in case. The fact that it's still misbehaving after taking out the supposedly-bad HDD makes me wonder if a BIOS flash went wrong. I have a copy of the debug BIOS, but no 1MB modchips on hand. I only have an Aladdin XT+2 and a DUO X2 Lite, neither of which can handle a 1MB BIOS. So I can get a better modchip and boot from that, but I'm not sure if that's even the problem.

I've also tried swapping the power supply with the same one from a different Xbox to no avail.

Any tips?

Edited by GoTeamScotch
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On 8/28/2020 at 7:41 PM, GoTeamScotch said:

I have a broken debug kit Xbox that I'm hoping to salvage and get working again and could use some pointers. It starts to boot up but hangs at the X screen during bootup (no Microsoft logo).

There is some trace-rot and corrosion present on the board, and I'm hoping it's not bad enough to be causing these issues. The clock capacitor was leaking but it was very minor.

e00SGDfl.jpg

High-res photos of the board: https://imgur.com/a/sESsyvi

There's also a bodge-job done to the underside of the board, which I'm not sure what it does.

spacer.png

The orange D0 wire was added by me. The thermal tape was there when I got it.

The hard drive does not make any sound at all, so I hooked the HDD up to a PC and my PC couldn't read it (still no spin-up or reading sounds coming from the drive). I suspect that the drive may be broken. I swapped in a similar model HDD's logic board (first part of model was the same, last part was slightly different) and then the drive spun-up, but was clicking ('click of death' sound), but I'm not sure if this is from the drive being busted or from it being the wrong logic board.

I burned 5849_Recovery to a disc, swapped in a different (unlocked) Xbox HDD and tried to boot from the disc and it hung at the same spot in the bootup process. I tried a different DVD drive too just in case. The fact that it's still misbehaving after taking out the supposedly-bad HDD makes me wonder if a BIOS flash went wrong. I have a copy of the debug BIOS, but no 1MB modchips on hand. I only have an Aladdin XT+2 and a DUO X2 Lite, neither of which can handle a 1MB BIOS. So I can get a better modchip and boot from that, but I'm not sure if that's even the problem.

I've also tried swapping the power supply with the same one from a different Xbox to no avail.

Any tips?

do all the capicitors look good?

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6 hours ago, bulkchart32 said:

I only have an Aladdin XT+2 and a DUO X2 Lite, neither of which can handle a 1MB BIOS.

Hi, you can use either of the chips to test the mb you would just not be using the mb bios. If the Xbox boots up using the chip but not the onboard bios you will know that that is the issue.

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10 hours ago, bulkchart32 said:

do all the capicitors look good?

Going by what they visually look like, yes. I don't see bulging or odd cues. I haven't checked them beyond that so far.

3 hours ago, Ging3rguy said:

Hi, you can use either of the chips to test the mb you would just not be using the mb bios. If the Xbox boots up using the chip but not the onboard bios you will know that that is the issue.

I currently don't have any chips that can hold a 1MB BIOS, like the debug BIOS.

Technically I have a Xenium Ice chip that has big enough BIOS banks, but it doesn't work with debug (MX2) boards.

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4 hours ago, GoTeamScotch said:

Going by what they visually look like, yes. I don't see bulging or odd cues. I haven't checked them beyond that so far.

I currently don't have any chips that can hold a 1MB BIOS, like the debug BIOS.

Technically I have a Xenium Ice chip that has big enough BIOS banks, but it doesn't work with debug (MX2) boards.

but if u cam see that it is at least a functioning xbox, that will be a clue as to what is wrong.

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Good evening,

as nothing seems to be out of order, I would rather first prepare a new hdd. As this is a debug kit, you could use an unlocked disk only if you boot on the official recovery disk that permit to choose between debug bios and commercial bios.

Please look at: https://www.ogxbox.com/forums/index.php?/topic/1881-devkit-recovery-collection/

bye

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7 hours ago, GoTeamScotch said:

Going by what they visually look like, yes. I don't see bulging or odd cues. I haven't checked them beyond that so far.

I currently don't have any chips that can hold a 1MB BIOS, like the debug BIOS.

Technically I have a Xenium Ice chip that has big enough BIOS banks, but it doesn't work with debug (MX2) boards.

You don’t need a 1mb bios on a chip to test the mb, your mb has a 1 mb bios but you would not be using that if you install a chip.

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Can you post a couple of hi-res photos: one of the entire top of the motherboard and one of the entire bottom of the motherboard?

The bodge looks like a pull-up resistor was left off of the motherboard.  The tech installed a larger 1/4 watt 10KOhm resistor to connect from a 3.3Vdc or 5Vdc location at the SMD resistor end to the signal that needed the pull-up.

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From discussion in other Xbox channels, I don't believe you will be able to use an OpenXenium chip that can hold a 1MB BIOS to fix the console.  The XeniumOS is coded for a retail console which uses the hidden ROM code stored in an X3 version of the MCPX which decrypts the 2BL section of the BIOS with a retail key, not the X2 version installed on Debug consoles which has the bootloader in the BIOS image itself.  You can only boot a debug BIOS that is coded to work with the X2 MCPX that has no hidden ROM (code section) in the MCPX X2 but stored in the TSOP flash memory chip on the motherboard.

 

An X3 should work with the bank select switch set to autoboot one of the 1MB BIOS banks flashed with the proper debug BIOS image.

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Hmm, the BIOS inside the debug.bin file I found for the Xbox is actually only 512KBs in size.  This file contains 2 copies of the 512KB BIOS stored consecutively making the file 1MB in size - the size of the flash memory chip on the motherboard.  Thus, the DuoX2 modchip with it's 512KB banks may work to boot a BIOS from the LPC Debug port.  Split the debug.bin file in half and flash it to one of the DuoX2's 512KB banks.

Edit: The Xecuter 2 BIOS Manager (X2BM) makes it easy to store individual BIOSes from a multiBIOS dot bin file such as the debug.bin BIOS file.

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20 hours ago, KaosEngineer said:

Hmm, the BIOS inside the debug.bin file I found for the Xbox is actually only 512KBs in size.  This file contains 2 copies of the 512KB BIOS stored consecutively making the file 1MB in size - the size of the flash memory chip on the motherboard.  Thus, the DuoX2 modchip with it's 512KB banks may work to boot a BIOS from the LPC Debug port.  Split the debug.bin file in half and flash it to one of the DuoX2's 512KB banks.

Edit: The Xecuter 2 BIOS Manager (X2BM) makes it easy to store individual BIOSes from a multiBIOS dot bin file such as the debug.bin BIOS file.

Thanks for the info. I used that tool to split the bios off into a 512kb version and flashed that to my Duo x2 lite chip. This didn't produce any different outcome.

However, I was able to get the Xbox working. It turned out that I just needed to use a different DVD drive because the Thomson drive I was using couldn't read my burned recovery disc. I swapped it out for a Samsung drive and the recovery CD booted right up. I swapped in a different hard drive and ran the recovery application. It's now booting to the XDK dash as expected.

It sucks that the stock hard drive turned out to be the problem. I wonder what was on the hard drive before it failed. Seems like the only way to find out would be to swap the platters into a donor drive... and I don't have a clean room.

Edited by GoTeamScotch
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43 minutes ago, KaosEngineer said:

Hmm, does the hard drive spin up?  is it clicking? The drive should be unlocked. 

Connect it to a PC and try reading the data with the Beta 3 version of FATXplorer.

https://fatxplorer.eaton-works.com/3-0-beta/

Yeah I tried hooking it up to a PC and it didn't work. No sound of the platters spinning up either. I tried swapping the logic board/PCB from another similar HDD, and that resulted in the drive clicking. Not sure if clicking is the result of using the wrong HDD PCB (different firmware maybe) or it just being a dead drive.

I've installed Hack-devkit-GueuX-V2 to be able to run signed XBEs. Are there debug BIOSes with LBA48 support? Or am I stuck with a max 137GB HDD?

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  • 4 weeks later...

On a somewhat related note, I was successfully able to flash the debug bios to my X2 Duo Lite to get a separate DVT4 kit Xbox working. I split it from 1mb to 512kb, flashed it using a retail Xbox, then transferred it over to my DVT4.

While this is great progress, I want to recover the TSOP on this DVT4 just so I don't have to leave the modchip in there. All of the resources I've found online describe how to fix a bad tsop flash using special bioses and grounding the D0 and A15 points at specific timings. These special bioses were made for retail boards and not debug/DVT boards in mind, and so I assume these bioses wouldn't be compatible.

Edit- I'm going to continue the conversation over in this thread, which seems to be relevant to what I'm trying to do.

Edited by GoTeamScotch
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  • 4 weeks later...

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