SATA HDD Upgrade

[joublogs]

3 hours ago, KaosEngineer said:

Make sure there are no bent pins or broken wires for all of the power/control cable connections at the cable ends as well as the motherboard and DVD drive connectors.

Seems to be fine and the DVD works with the original HDD installed. So, so weird.

I will double check everything again though.

[joublogs]

Further update and information:

1. I checked all pins: good
2. Checked all cables: all looked good
3. Swapped out cables to the DVD for another: still same issue
4. Swapped out DVD for another, here it gets weird

New DVD would constantly ejects right after insertion. After some attempts randomly pressing the eject button I got it to close and the dash read the disk as "game".

Rebooted and the OG Xbox disk loaded without any weird seek behaviour.

So I conclude that:

1. The original DVD drive is not working correctly
2. The new drive works to some degree.

From googling a bit it seems the new drive could have an issue, or it could be the clock cap (this might be the source of all of the issues I suppose?).

The clock cap did leak slightly but there was no obvious damage.

I will try with a SATA drive and adapter next.

Thank you to everyone who contributed suggestions. At least now I have an xbox with new HDD that seems to work to some extent

Edited January 21, 2022 by joublogs
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[flip_flop]

Bit of a necro post but having had error 16 and figuring it out the hard way...I came to the same result and,I  think, at least in my case, I have found something that appears to be an explanation and fits my issues. On my other softmod box I could always boot discs regardless of the HDD state as long as it was there and partitions correct. That's how I would use a burned dvd to rebuild it..

Googling further to find more on various Xbox error codes I found myself at this post. Being inexperienced in more than softmodding my own box and upgrading it's drive, I've never tried to just repair a random box, but I intend to do more this place seems perfect!

Bit of a tale to this one... I bought a faulty xbox. Turned out it was chipped (super aladdin live) and the box was throwing all sorts of errors. 

Removing the chip completely got to a new error. The drive (upgraded) was not locked. Being once hardmodded that made sense.

 

I needed to lock it.. but how? Found I could get the eeprom from the Xbox by soldering a few wires to the Xbox and dumping it using my raspberry pi. Great success.

Finally got fat Xplorer to detect my drive, formatted it as standard Xbox drive and locked it.

Booted up, all looked good. Then, error 16!

This was a very new code! I found with some googling that this is is due to the system clock being unset. (could be wrong but leads to correct results and seems dashboard related)

The box tried to boot the Microsoft dash to set this Even trying to boot a game failed.

 

Retracing my steps I realised my error. My drive was blank!! I placed all the stock files on the drive and tried again. 

 

All sorted Xbox booted and asked me to set the date and time. I'm waiting on a programmer for the aladdin flash chip. My hunch is Someone tried to update their chip and broke it? Unlocked HDD leading to soft brick as no way of using default bios? 

 

 

 

Edited April 30, 2024 by flip_flop
Further info and typos. OCD, ADHD edit. Last one. Sorry if this is all common knowledge now but I was pleased to bring this box back from the dead. Getting the eeprom dump.. whoever found that i2c connection. Genius

[MadMartigan]

Cop and paste this all into a new thread post. You’ll have this fixed pretty soon. I just don’t want to clutter old posts and a new title could help others find answer in the future. 

[flip_flop]

I have done as you suggested.

 

I have fixed the issue,  I came across this post after the fact and was hoping to add my findings, info and advice for someone in a similar situation to mine. (hopefully correct and of use) Where I started and how I resolved it.

Edited April 30, 2024 by flip_flop