Years ago I was modding my own and another Xbox at the same time(!) and somehow things got mixed up and I locked the drive of my Xbox. I haven’t been back to it since. I read that it was possible to unlock the drive using a PC? I don’t have the type of pc I could plug the drive into but I would find one if this seemed doable?
I replaced the belt on my dvd drive and it works great.
FWIW I could never get a replacement hard drive to work on my 1.6 until I got a modchip but I’ve been told others have been able to.
You would need the key that was used to lock it. If you have that I could dig up what I did in a linux live cd/usb environment to make that work, I used hdparm and the key formatted a certain way to unlock it.
Thanks!
I’ll make some time to get things out and take a look.
Turns out I had my xbox drive unlocked and had to relock it with hdparm, but maybe there’s something you can use there.
I said in the post that you’d need an ide slot on your motherboard but I suspect it would work with an ide to usb adapter as well.
1 Like
I picked up an Xbox on FB marketplace for $20 (they usually go for $50-70) in my area. I had a relative pick it up for me but I’m told it powers up. Really looking forward to jumping into a system that I never owned back in the day. Funnily enough I do own a few games for it though!
Get Ninja Gaiden Black! I think it’s the best game on the platform.
1 Like
Duly noted!
My console will arrive today I’m looking forward to cracking it open and seeing which revision it is. I’m about to pull the trigger on a game for the softmod or a modchip but I’ll wait and see if it’s a model that I can TSOP flash.
I love modding these old systems - since I got it for next to nothing I might even do a RAM upgrade for shits and giggles.
It’s a 1.6 or 1.6b as it has the xcalibur video encoder. I’m actually pretty happy with this as there’s no clock capacitor gunk on the board and I’ve inspected all of the caps and none seem to be bulging. The system had never been opened (those torx screws required a bit of elbow grease) just for now I’m giving it a clean inside and out.
I’m doing a bit of research now as to what is involved to chip the unit as I want to be able to change the HDD and it looks like a pretty simple solution of restoring a header for the chip.
edit
Man what a learning experience that was - the unit I got was filthy on the exterior but had never been opened. Thankfully other than a great deal of dust there was little maintenance to be done. At first the disc tray would not opened but once I disassembled it and re-positioned the belt it worked perfectly. I don’t presently have any video cables for it which limits what I can do at the moment but I had a great afternoon tinkering with it and getting it to look as clean and tidy as possible. I’ve ordered a cheap component cable for testing along with the bits and pieces I’ll need to mod it.
Here’s the before picture:
This was taken by the seller - I assure you it looked much worse in person. The grills were caked with cigarette residue and the front had some kind of sticker gunk on it.
Here’s the console after some heavy duty TLC:
It took me three hours to clean this thing to my standard - I blasted out the dust with compressed air but the tough part was actually the exterior. Due to how well packed the console is all of the internals were more or less shielded from the smoke residue, I used an acrylic paint brush for fine cleaning on the motherboard and fan but it didn’t take long at all.
For the filthy stanky exterior I started with isopropyl alcohol and a toothbrush to clean the gunk out of those grills. I followed that with a natural citrus cleaner that leaves a nice scent with a final coat of a plastic cleaner I use to bring out the finish. It still probably needs another go but I’m happy with it for now.
edit 2
After an afternoon of research I may have gone a little overboard (mostly because it is so cheap!) I ordered::
- Aladdin XT Plus2 modchip (so I can swap the HDD)
- LPC Rebuild board (for easier installation)
- SATA to IDE converter
- 80 wire IDE Cable
- USB Adapter for softmod installation (just as a backup)
My understanding is that this setup will let me just throw a brand new HDD in, boot Hexentools and partition it to my liking. I’ve got a 500gb sata drive laying around that I will give a go once all of this gear arrives.
5 Likes
I remember back in the day when I had to splice together a usb cable and the pray I had a flash drive that would work as a memory card on the Xbox. I didn’t even have a soldering iron back then. I literally just twisted the wires together.
2 Likes
Wow that’s dedication! 
It really was cheap to grab the gear to mod this thing - I think I spent inside of $20 all up and that includes cables. It will no doubt be two or three weeks until I have all of the bits and pieces but I’m really looking forward to an afternoon of tinkering.
It’s really an awesome system to mod.
Look into Coinops once you get everything setup.
1 Like
I will - although my understanding is that the Xbox can’t do 240p? My 20L2 is only 15khz so I doubt it will get much use as an emulation box at 480i.
I’m more interested in playing exclusives and better versions of the multiplats I enjoyed on PS2 (Burnout 3, TimeSplitters 2 and 3 etc)
1 Like
I just found out that the arcade emulators support the xbox light gun. I plan on trying it out when I get one in.
I also recommend grabbing a copy of Dead or Alive 2 Ultimate. It’s my favorite in the series and still looks amazing.
3 Likes
Well guys, looks like my OG Xbox is pretty much near useless at this point, this one has a problem I’ve never seen before: For some reason when I press the disc drive button to power the console and open the disc drive it now won’t open the disc drive and it’ll just power on for a second and shuts itself off, so now I have to get another OG Xbox. 1st the Xbox 360 slim died on me in January and now this fails on the 1st day of March…this is crazy!!!
Bummer. My condolences.
I just picked up an HD AV pack for $40 and my 80 pin IDE cable arrived today.
So far I’m just waiting on my IDE to Sata converter and my Aladdin mod chip and LPC rebuild boards so I can start modding!
Maybe it can be fixed still. Hopefully a fix won’t be too much. If you don’t want to go through that trouble I’m sure someone would still buy it for parts/fixing.
I want to get 480p happening on my PAL Xbox which requires a soft mod apparently. How much did you guys spend getting all the parts together to mod your consoles? Also what’s the going rate on component cables?
Composite 480i is serviceable at the moment but I think I can get some easy wins hopefully cheaply.
Only started to look into XBOX recently myself as got given an XBOX with had a badly leaking clock capacitor which I have now removed.
I installed an Aladdin XT mod chip in it as they are still readily available and cheap.
Just burn Enigmah’s Video Select ISO to a DVD and use that to enable 480p/720p and 1080i video options once your XBOX is either soft or hard moded.