xbox woes

[tomahawk]

Was cleaning attic and found old xbox from about 10 years ago, It had xecuter 2.6 solderless chip with pogo pins and D0 wire and 250gb drive , turned it on and it went straight to MS dash, opened up xbox cleaned it out took chip of pin headers cleaned it also resoldered the 3 wires from chip to back of motherboard. Booted up and again loaded MS dash so cleaned and resoldered again and tried and once again went to MS dash. Chip must have went faulty so unsoldered wires and took chip out..So now I have a 250gb hard drive that boots to MS dash. I did have a backup of the eeprom on my old pc back then but that has long gone and do not have any backup eeprom now. So i now have a 250gb hard drive with all the stuff on it and can not access it...Have included a picture of chip that was in xbox the three wires red,green and grey were soldered to underside of motherboard...Is there any way to access the drive which is locked ? Any help

[KaosEngineer]

At the end of the startup animation, was XECUTER2 displayed underneath the big X logo?  Or, during the animation, an EvoX logo displayed in the upper left-hand corner of the screen?

Reinstall the modchip then from the stock dashboard, check the kernel version that is booting?

Edit: In the stock MS dashboard, go to Settings > System Info.  Wait for the end of the scroller before it repeats.  What are the K and D line values?

A stock BIOS may be flashed to both banks of the modchip.

 

 

[tomahawk]

"At the end of the startup animation, was XECUTER2 displayed underneath the big X logo?  Or, during the animation, an EvoX logo displayed in the upper left-hand corner of the screen?" 

 No none of this was displayed just normal flubber xbox loading screen.and the kernal was 5831 and board is a 1.6,  also I did not install the chip originally is there a tut how to install xecuter 2.6 ce solderless chip with pogo adapter or without pogo adapter .

[KaosEngineer]

For the kernel version, did you mean 5838?  If so, that is the stock BIOS.

Where the blue LED lights lit on the modchip?  and, LEDs on the front control panel lit?

Was the front panel switch for Modchip Enable was set to On,  not Off?

There is an installation guide captured by archive.org's Wayback Machine.

Let me find the link to it and I'll post it in another reply.

 

[KaosEngineer]

Here's the Xapter installation guide:

Xapter Install Troubleshooting (archive.org)

Since you have a v1.6 Xbox, was the LPC rebuild done on the bottom of the motherboard?

Microsoft removed the signals from the LPC debug port on a v1.6 console that are required for a modchp to work.  Without an LPC rebuild either by additional wires installed to restore the signals to each pin or LPC rebuild PCB installed, a modchip will not work simply by installing a pin header or wireless pogo pin adapter.

[KaosEngineer]

No separate X2.6 install guide. The X3 and X2.6 modchip installation are very similar so one guide to cover both was released by Team Xecuter. With the X2.6, there's no motherboard front panel power/eject adapter board to install so skip that section. And, the control switch board is different.  I thought I'd seen a X2.6CE install guide but all I'm coming up with is this guide which says for X3/X2.6:

X3 INSTALL TUTORIAL : PIN HEADER : v1.6 (archive.org)

 

 

[tomahawk]

There was no blue light on modchip and no lights on dip switches and chip was set to on and also led lights set to on...

I had a better look at motherboard today and found it is not a 1.6...Manufacture date = 13-1-2003 It has a Conexant video chip and samsung ram chips and power connector has 2 rows and also there seems to be a clock cap which I have shown in picture which has not been removed. So now not sure which board it has any ideas before I go any further.

 

[KaosEngineer]

2 hours ago, tomahawk said:

There was no blue light on modchip and no lights on dip switches and chip was set to on and also led lights set to on...

I had a better look at motherboard today and found it is not a 1.6...Manufacture date = 13-1-2003 It has a Conexant video chip and samsung ram chips and power connector has 2 rows and also there seems to be a clock cap which I have shown in picture which has not been removed. So now not sure which board it has any ideas before I go any further.

<KE: Image removed from quoted text, see previous post for it>

With a Conexant video encoder and a 2x10 ATX-style power supply unit connector, the motherboard is either a v1.2 or v1.3 revision.

Without any LEDs lit on the modchip and switch board - they can be turned off on it with the LED ON/OFF switch on the back of the control PCB - the modchip is not receiving power to operate.  I suggest getting rid of the solderless pogo pin adapter and solder in a 2x8 pin, 0.1" centers pin header to connect the modchip to the LPC debug port.

[KaosEngineer]

Archived X3/X3CE/X2.6CE pin header installation tutorial:

X3 INSTALL TUTORIAL : PIN HEADER : v1.0 - v1.5 (archive.org)

[tomahawk]

ok will get a pinheader and give it a try...If I do get chip up and running would all stuff still be on the 250gb  hard drive  as chip was installed originally and used to work?

[KaosEngineer]

3 hours ago, tomahawk said:

ok will get a pinheader and give it a try...If I do get chip up and running would all stuff still be on the 250gb  hard drive  as chip was installed originally and used to work?

Everything that was on the hard drive should still be there.  Can't guarantee it is but unless you or someone else deleted files ??? they will be there.

When you get to the point of installing a newer BIOS version, make sure the LBA48 settings match the current hard drives partition configuration.

Run XBPartitioner v1.3 before upgrading the BIOS to obtain the settings of the extended partition(s).  Post a screen shot of the app's main screen.

[tomahawk]

Ok so got pinheader installed chip and still nothing just loads MS dash so chip for some reason must have went faulty or something over the years in attic  so kind of stuck, I think I need to find someone with an eeprom reader to get bios from board and then might be able to unlock the drive, at least then I might be able to see the drive on pc and recover the stuff from it...Could I softmod it with game save method? I know its not ideal but at least I could probably get the full 250gb drive back up and running...Or if I got the bios could I then install a smaller drive in the xbox?

PS:- Tried xplorer360 and fatxplorer on pc and none of them can see the drive as as it prob because it is locked.

[tomahawk]

Got the xbox HDD key after a number of tries with dvd power disconnected then tried a number of times waiting till error 12 appeared then done a hotswap using IDE to USB adapter but nothing so I then tried  a few times with as soon as x logo appeared on screen then hotswapped and eventually got it to be recognised with fatexplorer and managed to copy the c partition to pc which had a backup folder with eeprom.bin etc in it...So I believe I have to burn HDAT2 to disc and unlock the hard drive with that...

Edited April 18, 2022 by tomahawk

[KaosEngineer]

Since you have the eeprom.bin file, you can use smartctl.exe (a command-line tool) included with XboxHDM23USB Beta 2 or 3 to unlock the hard drive. 

Run cmd.exe with the Run as Administrator option to open a command-line window.

CD to the folder where the content extracted from the XboxHDM23USB Beta 2 or Beta 3 archive was extracted.

Copy the eeprom.bin file to this folder

For Beta 3, CD into the subfolder XboxHD where smartctl.exe is located.  No need to CD with Beta 2. smartctl.exe should be in the current folder.

Run smartctl.exe --scan to determine which drive is the Xbox hard drive.

Which drive listed in the output is the Xbox hard drive?  note the /dev/sd? name associated with it.

If you are not able to determine which hard drive is the xbox drive, issue the following command:

• wmic diskdrive get model,name

The model of the drive is listed as well as the device name Windows assigned to the drive. For smartctl.exe, you need the /dev/sd? name associated with the \\.\PHYSICALDRIVEN device Windows assigned:

• \\.\PHYSICALDRIVE0 = /dev/sda
•  \\.\PHYSICALDRIVE1 = /dev/sdb
•  \\.\PHYSICALDRIVE2 = /dev/sdc
• etc.

Issue the following command(s) but replace %1 with the letter represented by the ? above or determined from the wmic command's output.

• Check the hard drive's current lock status:
  • smartctl.exe -g security /dev/sd%1  <--- replace %1 by a single letter (e.g., sdb, sdc, sdd, etc.) 
• To unlock the hard drive to be able to read/write content until the next power cycle:
  • smartctl.exe -s security-eeprom-unlock,eeprom.bin /dev/sd%1   

Only issue the following command to completely remove the locking password.  If your console is softmodded, DO NOT DO IT! (Although since you have the eeprom.bin backup you can relock the hard drive.  A softmodded console requires the hard drive to be locked for the Xbox to boot; otherwise an error screen will appear.)

• smartctl.exe -s security-eeprom-disable,eeprom.bin /dev/sd%1

To remove the locking password both the unlock and disable command need to be issued.  Unlock then disable commands in that order.

[tomahawk]

I noticed a couple of capacitors are a bit bulgy at thevtop..so asking if I could replace the 2 bulgy ones which are nichicon 6.3v3300 uF hm(m) capacitors black and grey in colour

with 2 rubycon 6.3v3300 uF mbz capacitors which are black and gold in colour that a mate has offered from an different old parts board  

and Kaos Engineer I will give the above cmd.exe a try...thanks

[tomahawk]

I have managed to unlock drive after a good few attempts so all good there...Thanks Kaos Engineer

so asking if I could replace the 2 capacitors that are bulging at the top which are nichicon 6.3v3300 uF hm(m) capacitors black and grey in colour

with the 2 rubycon 6.3v3300 uF mbz capacitors which are black and gold in colour that a mate has offered from an different board  he used for spare parts.

They are the same size and voltage etc

 

[KaosEngineer]

1 hour ago, tomahawk said:

I have managed to unlock drive after a good few attempts so all good there...Thanks Kaos Engineer

so asking if I could replace the 2 capacitors that are bulging at the top which are nichicon 6.3v3300 uF hm(m) capacitors black and grey in colour

with the 2 rubycon 6.3v3300 uF mbz capacitors which are black and gold in colour that a mate has offered from an different board  he used for spare parts.

They are the same size and voltage etc

 

yes. There's most likely one or two more 3300uF caps in the region that need to be replaced too even if they are not bulging at this time.