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[Help!] Flashed Cerbios 2.01 Retail BIOS to an Xbox 1.1 TSOP and have red/green flashing lights


tktagmedia
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Hello everyone.

I just finished TSOPing an Xbox model 1.1 and decided I wanted to flash Cerbios 2.01 Retail, and after flashing I have a red/green flashing light with no picture.  The system is hooked up via composite (yellow, red and white) video cables and now I have no picture.  

I cannot access FTP, either.  

I was also sure to FTP over the Cerbios.ini and boot animations to the root of C ahead of flashing.

Can anyone help or point me in the right direction?  
Thank you.

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5 hours ago, tktagmedia said:

Ah, hell.  I know where my mistake was made: I used the wrong flasher with the wrong chip.  Outside of a modchip, is there any way to rescue this?  Otherwise I'll order an Aladdin.

You officially need a chip, my friend, since you now have no BIOS to boot from to remedy the mistake. :( Thatˋs the joy of TSOP flashing. If it doesnˋt work the first time, you canˋt try again... unless you boot from a chip and do it.

Edit: Wait a minute. Kaos, can you flash a bios to the TSOP when booted from an LPC bios?

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9 hours ago, tktagmedia said:

Hello everyone.

I just finished TSOPing an Xbox model 1.1 and decided I wanted to flash Cerbios 2.01 Retail, and after flashing I have a red/green flashing light with no picture.  The system is hooked up via composite (yellow, red and white) video cables and now I have no picture.  

I cannot access FTP, either.  

I was also sure to FTP over the Cerbios.ini and boot animations to the root of C ahead of flashing.

Can anyone help or point me in the right direction?  
Thank you.

Odd as Cerbios is supposed to work with TSOP 1.0-1.5 - I just flashed Cerbios 2.01 on a 1.4 last night no issue.  Only flashed TSOP no ini or boot animations.

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1 hour ago, Donnie-Burger said:

Odd as Cerbios is supposed to work with TSOP 1.0-1.5 - I just flashed Cerbios 2.01 on a 1.4 last night no issue.  Only flashed TSOP no ini or boot animations.

I think different versions have different TSOP sizes, and they have to be flashed a certain way (redundantly) if the bios file is smaller than the chipˋs total space. So you need to flash a file compatible with your boxˋs specific TSOP chip, ensuring that the chipˋs space is fully written to. Otherwise, a FRAG occurs.

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15 minutes ago, Bowlsnapper said:

I think different versions have different TSOP sizes, and they have to be flashed a certain way (redundantly) if the bios file is smaller than the chipˋs total space. So you need to flash a file compatible with your boxˋs specific TSOP chip, ensuring that the chipˋs space is fully written to. Otherwise, a FRAG occurs.

Forgot about that.  Only the Sharp is different file size of 1MB.  Rest are 256KB.

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12 hours ago, Bowlsnapper said:

You officially need a chip, my friend, since you now have no BIOS to boot from to remedy the mistake. :( Thatˋs the joy of TSOP flashing. If it doesnˋt work the first time, you canˋt try again... unless you boot from a chip and do it.

Edit: Wait a minute. Kaos, can you flash a bios to the TSOP when booted from an LPC bios?

I say NO.  

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8 hours ago, Donnie-Burger said:

Odd as Cerbios is supposed to work with TSOP 1.0-1.5 - I just flashed Cerbios 2.01 on a 1.4 last night no issue.  Only flashed TSOP no ini or boot animations.

Depends which BIOS flashing software was used to flash the v1.1's TSOP.  Not all of the flashing software fills the flash memory chip.  Some write the one copy of the dot bin file leaving the rest of the flash chip empty.

GentooX Loader is one that does not write multiple copies of the BIOS to fill the flash.  If that tool was used, then the 1MB TSOP now contains:

  • 256KB CerBIOS
  • 256KB Empty (0xFF filled)
  • 256KB Empty (0xFF filled)
  • 256KB Empty (0xFF filled)

Instead of

  • 256KB CerBIOS
  • 256KB CerBIOS
  • 256KB CerBIOS
  • 256KB CerBIOS

You should be able to solder two wires to force access to the first 256KB BIOS.

Like used to fix a COMA v1.0 or v1.1 console.

Xbox Coma Console (archive.org)

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30 minutes ago, KaosEngineer said:

Depends which BIOS flashing software was used to flash the v1.1's TSOP.  Not all of the flashing software fills the flash memory chip.  Some write the one copy of the dot bin file leaving the rest of the flash chip empty.

GentooX Loader is one that does not write multiple copies of the BIOS to fill the flash.  If that tool was used, then the 1MB TSOP now contains:

  • 256KB CerBIOS
  • 256KB Empty (0xFF filled)
  • 256KB Empty (0xFF filled)
  • 256KB Empty (0xFF filled)

Instead of

  • 256KB CerBIOS
  • 256KB CerBIOS
  • 256KB CerBIOS
  • 256KB CerBIOS

You should be able to solder two wires to force access to the first 256KB BIOS.

Like used to fix a COMA v1.0 or v1.1 console.

Xbox Coma Console (archive.org)

DAMN, youˋre good. So FRAGs are just caused by the beginning of the TSOPˋs flash being empty. Makes sense. The data doesnˋt start where itˋs being seeked. Why the hell would any utility not begin writing to the flash at the beginning anyway?... and what is the proper terminology for what I just asked, so I can sound like less of a fucking moron in the future?

What is the reason for opposite BIOS sources not being accessible to each other? I thought the LPC or TSOP is just a bank that the MCPX looks to to load a bios that just ends up being run from RAM like everything else? Maybe I need to finally comprehensively read the boot process of the Xbox. I donˋt even know how software directs a write command to the TSOP or LPC respectively in the first place. Would you mind explaining that, Kaos? Or at least directing me to the correct answer?

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3 hours ago, Bowlsnapper said:

DAMN, youˋre good. So FRAGs are just caused by the beginning of the TSOPˋs flash being empty. Makes sense. The data doesnˋt start where itˋs being seeked. Why the hell would any utility not begin writing to the flash at the beginning anyway?... and what is the proper terminology for what I just asked, so I can sound like less of a fucking moron in the future?

There are many causes for a FRAG.  An improperly flashed BIOS is just one of them.

Flashing the BIOS does start at address 0 of the flash memory chip and goes to the end of the size of the BIOS's dot bin file for some flashing applications. Others (e.g., Evoxdash, XBlastOS) write multiple copies of a smaller than flash size file to fill the entire flash chip.  For the Xbox, Microsoft originally used a 1MB flash memory chip that contained 4 copies of the BIOS data one after the other.  They later changed the size of the flash memory chip to a smaller sized device that holds one copy of the BIOS - 256 KB instead of 1 MB in size.

Excerpt from Understanding the Xbox boot process/Flash structures | Hacking the Xbox (hackspot.net)

Quote

Xbox boot Flash ROM

The standard retail Xbox uses a 1-Megabyte Flash ROM as the boot device. The Flash contains a bootloader (known as ‘bootloader2’ or ‘2bl’) which will decrypt/decompress a KERNEL image (also stored in Flash) and execute it. The KERNEL contains hardware initialization code, and low-level hardware-access functions used by Xbox applications.

The Xbox’s MCPX chip decodes the top 16-Megabytes of the CPU’s address space (F0000000-FFFFFFFF) as the boot ROM memory region. Because the Flash chip is only 1-MByte, its contents will “mirror” 16-times throughout this region.

The standard retail Xbox’s 1-Mbyte Flash chip actually contains 4 (identical) 256-Kbyte images (we’ll call this image the “Xbox OS image”).  So, the same 256-Kbyte image is repeated 64 times throughout the 16-MByte Flash memory region.

When making modifications to the Xbox Flash image, it is important to keep in mind that some data structures are accessed relative to the top of the chip, and others from the bottom of the chip (different 256-KByte regions of the 1-MByte Flash). It’s easiest to just start with a 256-KByte image, make your modifications to that, then replicate it
throughout the Flash chip.

If Gentoox Loader is used to flash a 1MB TSOP of v1.0/1.1 Xboxes, the bios.bin file needs to be 1 MB in size (4x the 256KB BIOS) not a single 256KB bios file so it writes data to fill the entire 1MB chip.

As noted in the last quoted paragraph above, if a single copy of a 256KB BIOS is flashed to a 1MB TSOP flash memory chip the content of some data structures will be filled with 0xFFs at the end of the flash chip, not the correct data as found in the first 256KB of the chip; thus the FRAG. The console will not boot, freezes during startup and the System Management Controller recognizes that a problem has occurred and resets the console a few times in the hope that the error clears before it flashes the eject ring red and green (FRAGs) indicating a general system failure has occurred.

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4 hours ago, KaosEngineer said:

Depends which BIOS flashing software was used to flash the v1.1's TSOP.  Not all of the flashing software fills the flash memory chip.  Some write the one copy of the dot bin file leaving the rest of the flash chip empty.

GentooX Loader is one that does not write multiple copies of the BIOS to fill the flash.  If that tool was used, then the 1MB TSOP now contains:

  • 256KB CerBIOS
  • 256KB Empty (0xFF filled)
  • 256KB Empty (0xFF filled)
  • 256KB Empty (0xFF filled)

Instead of

  • 256KB CerBIOS
  • 256KB CerBIOS
  • 256KB CerBIOS
  • 256KB CerBIOS

You should be able to solder two wires to force access to the first 256KB BIOS.

Like used to fix a COMA v1.0 or v1.1 console.

Xbox Coma Console (archive.org)

Forgot to mention - Flashing using Xblast OS .xbe

Edited by Donnie-Burger
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8 hours ago, KaosEngineer said:

There are many causes for a FRAG.  An improperly flashed BIOS is just one of them.

Flashing the BIOS does start at address 0 of the flash memory chip and goes to the end of the size of the BIOS's dot bin file for some flashing applications. Others (e.g., Evoxdash, XBlastOS) write multiple copies of a smaller than flash size file to fill the entire flash chip.  For the Xbox, Microsoft originally used a 1MB flash memory chip that contained 4 copies of the BIOS data one after the other.  They later changed the size of the flash memory chip to a smaller sized device that holds one copy of the BIOS - 256 KB instead of 1 MB in size.

Excerpt from Understanding the Xbox boot process/Flash structures | Hacking the Xbox (hackspot.net)

If Gentoox Loader is used to flash a 1MB TSOP of v1.0/1.1 Xboxes, the bios.bin file needs to be 1 MB in size (4x the 256KB BIOS) not a single 256KB bios file so it writes data to fill the entire 1MB chip.

As noted in the last quoted paragraph above, if a single copy of a 256KB BIOS is flashed to a 1MB TSOP flash memory chip the content of some data structures will be filled with 0xFFs at the end of the flash chip, not the correct data as found in the first 256KB of the chip; thus the FRAG. The console will not boot, freezes during startup and the System Management Controller recognizes that a problem has occurred and resets the console a few times in the hope that the error clears before it flashes the eject ring red and green (FRAGs) indicating a general system failure has occurred.

Oh, I know FRAGs are caused by multiple things, I just meant when it comes to FRAGs resulting from improper TSOP writes. :)

Thank you for the info, sir. You are the man.

I canˋt believe it took me 17 years to realize that FRAG was short for "Flashing Red and Green." WOW.

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