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Xbox original slim mod


Jamesdude353
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Xbox original slim mod

Hey everyone this is a log and a tutorial on how to build an Xbox original slim.

 

Xbox builds modifications sections are listed in dot points.

In this build I will be adding and or installing the following:

  • A fan.
  • A laptop hard drive.
  • Led modified controller ports.
  • New screws to hold the casing bottom half and top half of the Xbox case together
  • Power input and IDE or sata ports on the side of the xbox for an external disc drive.

If the Xbox isn't cut completely accurate, painting and sanding the Xbox to fix the mistake is recommended.

The Tutorial will be finished later this week. If time allows due to work, money and having  a life.

The Xbox must be either chipped, tsopped flashed or contain the original disc drive board. This will stop the Xbox from throwing an error because the disc drive is missing. All of these will be shown and explained in the log. If you want to use an External disc drive you will have to chip the Xbox or tsop flash the Xbox still.

When completing this tutorial and or following my log please note that the Xbox must be turned off when plugging in your External disc drive. If the Xbox is not turned off,  it is recommended to turn off the Xbox as keeping the Xbox on while plugging in the External disc drive is not recommended or safe. The Xbox will not detect the drive, the Xbox must be restarted after the drive has been plugged in to allow the Xbox to detect the External disc drive. I am not responsible for your own faults, or any damages you cause to your Xbox or to your self when modding the Xbox please ensure that it is switched off, unplugged and that you complete an electrostatic discharge, by holding in the power button to drain the capacitors of any remaining power.

I recommend grounding yourself as well. Look up how to do this before you start.

Some sections of my mods will cover theory although you don't really need to understand everything in the theory. Just understand that this builds modifications sections should be completed in the same way or similar way to the log and or tutorial steps.

You will need to know how to solder for some parts of this tutorial, please if you do not know how to solder, practice on some leds and resistors outside of the Xbox and use a battery to turn them on or practice on something thats not as valued as your Xbox as you probably don't want to break your Xbox console.

Tools required for the full build

 

Tutorial in a few easy steps

Firstly you will need to own or buy an Xbox original. Keep in mind you cannot put your Xbox back into original shape after this as you will be cutting the case down. After cutting the case there is no turning back.

If you already know how to fully disassemble the Xbox original skip to step 12

Step 1

Clear a workstation area for you to work on the Xbox. You want to have enough space to place the Xbox down and take everything out of it. Once you have a good sized workstation area, open up the Xbox with Torque driver, you will need to use a T20H bit.

These bits are generally in any general Torque screwdriver set.

Step 2.

Flip the Xbox over to the Bottom, you will notice 4 rubber feet either peel the rubber feet from outside in. Peel the rubber feet either half way along to keep them half on the Xbox or peel them right off. Although remember to keep them unless your using different rubber feet for your build.

Step 3.

You will find a total of four torque screws, one under each rubber foot. Remove all four of the Torque screws. Once completed carefully peel back the Microsoft Corporation bar code sticker, if you want to put the sticker back on later, please ensure you peel the sticker of carefully and apply heat to the sticker, for the best removal.

Underneath this sticker you will find another torque screw, remove it.

Step 4.

Once you have removed this screw there is one more left. You will need to peel back the Xbox video games sticker from the top left hand corner, the text must be facing upwards. When removing this sticker note that it makes a cube pattern on the Xbox, this is so Xbox could see if the Xbox had been opened to void warranty.

Obviously you aren't worrying about warranty, although if you want the best possible outcome to make it look like the Xbox hasn't been opened. You will have to also peel this sticker of carefully with heat applied. The sticker does not have to come all the way off, it only has to be peeled until you see the last torque screw.

Once you have peeled the sticker back with heat, remove the last torque screw, push the sticker back part way to keep it from creasing, flip the Xbox the upright and pull the lid off of the Xbox. 

Step 5.

Once the Xbox is open you will find a DVD drive on the left side of the console and a hard drive on the right side of the Xbox. If you have never opened the Xbox and it has never been opened before you will find two torque screws in between the left side of the Xbox and the DVD drive and the DVD drive and the hard drive. You will also find a torque screw underneath the IDE cable in between the Xbox DVD drive and the Xbox hard drive. Remove these torque screws  with a

Step 6.

Once all the Xbox screws have been removed pull out the Xbox DVD drive by removing the IDE cable from the back of the drive and the Xbox power cable from the back of the DVD drive. The DVD drive can be pulled out of the plastic mount and put to the side, or the plastic mount can be removed with the drive on it.

Step 7.

Next remove the Molex power cable, and IDE cable from the Xbox hard drive, move the Molex cables out of the plastic mount cable mount  before pulling the mount out of the Xbox. Remove the hard drive with the plastic mount still attached. Put these to the side. Don't throw anything out you will need pretty much everything.

Step 8.

At this point your Xbox will still contain a motherboard, fan, power supply, power eject buttons, aluminium shielding and controller ports.

Remove the motherboard screws pull the motherboard out and place the motherboard on a non conductive material, such as a wooden bench top or glass bench top. Preferably place the motherboard in an Anti static bag. To remove the motherboard all cables must be removed from the motherboard and all screws must be removed. Do not drop any screws on the motherboard. This is to prevent the unlikely event of a short if you haven't completed an electrostatic discharge on the Xbox. Normally by the time it would take you to take the Xbox apart the power would be discharged completely anyway.

Step 9.

Remove the psu carefully and place it down on a non conductive material as well or place it in an Anti static bag. Do not put it down on any metal by accident or your going to have fun wiring up a Pico psu or another Xbox psu.

Step 10. Almost removed everything

Next remove the fan by pulling it upwards.

 

Step 11.

Remove the controller ports torque screws holding the controller ports down, next remove the controller ports. Pull them up to remove them. Next remove the aluminium shielding, the shielding needs to be pulled out slightly from underneath the front of the Xbox, underneath where the Xbox DVD drive was present you should be able to see where the aluminium slides in and under a front part of the Xbox casing. Once you have removed the aluminium from the front of the Xbox you should be able to pull the entire shielding off of the Xbox without bending the shielding too much.

 

Step 12.

Now that you have removed everything, you should now only have the case left. Clear space at your workstation, and mark out where to cut the Xbox, the picture below will show you how to use masking tape to mark out your cutting lines and will show you were to cut the Xbox. When cutting the Xbox you can use either a wireless multi tool with a cutting disc, a tenon saw although if you choose this option it will help to also use a multi tool, a good dremel tool, or a band saw if your confident.

Will be updated shortly.

 

To be updated this week

 

Edited by Jamesdude353
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I just built a slim yesterday, And was gettin ready to make a write up of mine, I used a 3.5" Drive and Cut up the original fan to make it fit.

Hope to see your build soon. Heres a couple pics of mine while we wait for yours..

IMG_20170709_215754.thumb.jpg.d3d184c0b02b091e9d3c3a3a64a987a2.jpg

 

IMG_20170709_215815.thumb.jpg.19219a813f00678e7ecf6b5d86edd9bf.jpg

Edited by MvZiC MaN
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I've uploaded some pictures on facebook although I need to finish it. The blue leds and the black jewel are nice touches. I've noticed you've got usb ports I'm considering adding them in although adding them on the right side and connecting them to the controller ports without actually removing the controller ports usb component. Is that a hard drive light on your console?

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just remember if you add the USB ports without removing the controller ports, you can have a controller and a usb plugged into the same port at the same time.

And It certainly is a Harddrive light! and the jewel actually has leds behind it Lighting the "XBOX" lettering

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  • 6 months later...
6 hours ago, dreadpiratewes said:

Step 13 ? ID love to learn how to do this . I can see remove disc tray but my xbox shuts down with no disc tray. how do I stop this from happening? Softmoded  8 gb xbox fyi.

What you're trying to do is eliminate the dvd drive? Remove the pcb from the drive and also retain the pcb that has a small switch on it that senses open/close.... mine had a small motor on it which i just snapped off the pcb by hand,.. ended up breaking hte pcb a bit on removal and it still worked.

There is a switch on the board that if taped down basically tells the other board "the tray is closed" then your xbox doesnt think its open. Some mod configs allow booting to other dash with tray open... obviously you lose this functionality.
so ya, basically with this method you have no issues because all of the above is retained inside the xbox and looks like a realdrive... when i was doing that it fealt wrong like "theres got to be a better way" and in the end i just took that route, the nice thing is you can always go back and with the above case mod (i did the exact same thing, cut from the drive line and then mod/cut internals accordingly)

Id like to try again one day with a 2.5" drive and an even more streamlined case, maybe even custom case. but until i find another box with a dvd drive that i deem too far gone, im not going to do this... honestly, the xbox is the only thing in my living room that takes a disc.... i access content via network only.

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6 hours ago, cOrPsE said:

if you guys TSOP your xbox and use a custom bios, you can run your xbox with no disk drive even plugged in. depends on the bios

i have never done this permanently
But i have encountered alot of people mentioning it does work, BUT certain things will have it hang-up a bit.
any experience on that?

I noticed my X3 box will boot without a dvd drive and seems to work fine but it was only during a slim set-up where i was using the dvd drive for flashing on the other console that i noticed it would boot without (never did an in-depth test) and most recently a TSOP flashed with ind-5003 booted without a dvd drive i did that for shits a gigs and actually had the 2nd hdd connected ready for chimp-clone and it booted like that. (boot animation was choppy and sound was off) WEIRD

I've seen alot of talk about potential issues (corpse you can chime in and stop me in my tracks with evidence of a fully functioning tsop no-dvd) it is a fail-safe to have the original pcb on board because i can 100% vouch for that set-up. i had anything and everything working with jsut the board attached and the "tray closed" emulated (tape)

Ive also read about the prospect of bridging pins on the power connector to have the best of both worlds... this is very interesting to me. I will tell you why.

I have a bad dvd drive on my X3 BOX, would not read discs, i had a crisis where i needed to recover my dash... i was able to boot hexen using an LG DVD-rom drive using my pc PSU and the ide connection from the xbox drive. So i had the power connected to the stock drive and the IDE cable connected to the pc drive which was powered by an external PC PSU. It read the disc way faster but i understand you cannot use these pc drives to read a game disc.

All of the above is booting into xbmc or unleashx or something like that, ive never been able to set-up multiple hdd in some kind of linux box configuration. I have no clue how to do that.

 

using file manager was supposedly one of the largest caveats for the "no-dvd bios" where the system would slow to a crawl.

Again, cOrPsE I have never tried it. But this may prompt me to do so. Would be nice to put closure to all of this.

I would like to have an option to temporarily (or externally) connect the dvd drive when/if i needed it while never needing it otherwise.

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iND-BiOS 5003 has No DVD Rom Hack.  No DVD connected should be okay. The configuration file must be placed in C:\ with the name ind-bios.cfg.

X2 5035 BIOS configuration file, x2config.ini, goes in E:\.  - Check for DVD Rom enable / disable if no DVD drive attached probably needs to be disabled:

; do dvd drive check
doDvdDriveCheck =  0

possibly need this setting too

; stop bios to boot DVDs
disableCdromBoot = 1

 

Edited by KaosEngineer
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