Picking up an original Xbox that errors...

[knave]

I'm going to be getting my hands on an original Xbox that powers up but won't read disks (as far as I know at all).

I've wanted to play with one of these for a long time but until now never found the right opportunity. I decided it's worth it for $25.

What can I do to softmod this box if the dvd-drive won't work?  I've been poking around, looking at xbox-scene for tips but nothing calls out to me. Though it would be cool If I use my lens cleaner disk and it starts working...if only temporarily.

I'm pretty interested in using this box to stream video.  Is their wireless for the original x-box? Is it fast enough for video?

Any suggestions would be helpful.

[shardian]

My coworkers son has an xbox with a bad drive that I keep bugging him to give me. I'll be watching this thread closely.

[ChadTower]

That info is very available over at xbox-scene... that isn't the most organized of places but if you trudge through it the wealth of info is very deep.  Look into the tutorials section.

[knave]

I took a glance over there.  I guess I'l like to know if you can do the softmod W/o using the DVD drive or if you can use a PC DVD drive.  I read the Tutorials on there for hooking up an external drive and am not sure if this will work. 

With a moded xbox you can use a pc drive (after splitting the HD power) all you do is open the stock drive. 

I want to do this to mod the box.  other wise I'll have to be more creative.  I'm not sure I want to spend any $$ on this so if worse comes to worse, I'll try to mod a HD in my Buddies Xbox and then swap out that Hard drive for the one in my broken unit.
(assuming I find that this will work)

Worse case, I'll get a new drive or a new laser but I really just want to stream video that I've recorded.

I'm picking it up today and was hoping to get a few opinions before I buy a brick for $25. LOL.

[slycrel]

Unless there's something new in the last year or so, you need the DVD drive to do a softmod.  If you put a modchip in it it won't matter, but the only softmods I know about are via running games on it.

And do your homework if you're thinking of swapping out drives to mod it -- each xbox has it's HDD encoded to the xbox itself that it's in via the EEPROM I think.  (Sorry, been a while since I've done this...)  So you'd have to go through all of the same hoops as if you were to put a bigger HDD in there in order to get it to work with the other xbox.  Then you'd need to go through the same steps again to get it back into your own xbox.

If you know someone with a solderless modchip then you could pop it in until you got some software loaded on the HDD and softmodded it that way as well.

There's also the possibility that the laster just needs cleaned or realigned as well.

xbox-scene is really where you should be looking though, that's where you'll get your answers.

[ChadTower]

Keep in mind that fully working Xboxes aren't much more than that now.  $60 at Gamestop, less on craigslist.

[Hoopz]

You can do a softmod by unlocking the hard drive with a song that has been copied onto the hard drive.  So...if the hard  drive has even 3 seconds of a song on it, you don't need to use the dvd drive at all.

[knave]

Good point hoopz:

Looks like I can mod the box by using ndure and the hotswap method.

I've read through a few tut's (heh my new xbox-scene lingo) and I'm pretty comfortable with the process.  I might get it to work even with my bum drive. I just need to be able to unlock the HD.

It seems pretty easy...burn a PC boot cd, boot. Unlock the HD (various ways). Swap in the xbox HD to secondary master. then let the PC install the softmod.

I still have a few hurdles to overcome but now that I at least feel that it is possible I'm comfortable in the attempt.

[Hoopz]

I've done a couple Knave and they are pretty easy.  Getting it so you unlock the hard drive is the hardest part and thats actually pretty easy.

Follow Textbook's tut and you'll be fine.  Good luck.

[knave]

So I picked it up and it's physically in pretty good shape.  It has some dust and light scratches but I think it's great for a six year old piece of hardware. (manufactured in 02)

All indicators point to it's being version 1.1. Being that I'm a total noob to Xboxes it seems to boot to the dash fine...access the HD, settings all work.

I'm still working on the DVD drive, but it doesn't seem too promising.  I tried both a DVD game and an audio CD.  The game gives me a "You need to connect the DVD playback kit reciever to a controller port to watch movies. Remove the disk to continue."

The CD just says disk not read.  No error codes or numbers though unless I missed them.  I was at work and only had 5-10 minutes to fiddle with it.

Since I can get into the dash and access the one saved live profile on the HD I'm confident that I can get the drive to unlock.  This means the hotswap will likely work. (famous last words!)

I have some googling to do and some apps to download.  I'm going to take my time on this...But I can't wait to take it apart! 

(Oh no there goes the MS warranty  )

[knave]

Just in case anyone cares, I was able to play around with it for a bit and got it to read a CD and rip a track to the HD. I may or may not be able to do it again but it means that I can now play the audio to unlock the HD.

I couldn't find my CD lense cleaner disk  but I do have the correct T#20 bit.

On a side note: Do people just tear through the two stickers to get to the screws on the bottom or peel them up?

[northerngames]

you lift the 4 outmost corners of the rubber feet until you see the screws dont take them off all the way but about half way or they usually will not stick again very good.

just poke your torx right through the 2 sticker's into the bolt head and the 4 under the feet there is 6 bolts total.

turn it back over and lift the top off.

wiggle your hdd power molex wires out of the side of the hdd tray then unplug it from the HDD along with the ide .

then there is a torx#8 screw that holds the hdd tray to the dvd tray usually under the ide cable where it runs across the top remove that screw and lift the hdd and tray up and out of the console.

now your dvd drive and tray has two more #8's on each side toward the front of the console remove the 2 screws and unplug your IDE and yellow power wires.

lift straight up and your dvd drive is out and just clips into the dvd tray just pull the side and it comes off.

now you can either swap this with any of the other xbox samsung, phillips, thomson, or the rare hitachi.

I preffer the samsung 605-B and not the 605-A.

any xbox drive will work in any xbox the new 360's they locked the motherboard and dvd drives but the origanal xbox's they locked the motherboard and hdd so any dvd drive from another xbox will work plug and play.

another option is to take apart the dvd drive and clean the laser eye and the bottom mirror that the laser cannon fires on.

if a cleaning does not work then you can tweak the laser pots 200-300-Ohms and it should work and if not the laser is shot.

you could also get a new laser and install it there is nothing hard with it really.

I would need to know the actual make and model of the dvd drive before I could go into detail of tearing it down and fixing whatever.

[knave]

Great info thanks. I've gone through the tut and burnt my install cd.

Everything was pretty clear except a few of the options when setting up the script.
Mainly I wasn't sure if I should leave the "Enable clock check" checked.  I just don't know.  It's off by default....but so were a bunch of other things I wanted.  I'll find out.

How hard is it to Do a re-install.  Can I just hotswap again and do it over? I'm still wading through the plethora of info over at Scene.

I'm interested in trying to clean the laser on the dvd drive, I'll ajust the pot up a but too.  If I get it running then great.

My biggest question now is what to do agter it's modded.  I know how to ftp so could put files on the box but just have so much to learn it's kind of overwelming.

Read read read...sigh. (what did I get myself into.)

[Hoagie_one]

ebay has a bunch of replacement dvd drives from $20 and up.  You could always go that route cant you?

[knave]

ebay has a bunch of replacement dvd drives from $20 and up.  You could always go that route cant you?

LOL, Totally.  However when I first decided to pick this thing up I really only wanted to play around with it's guts and get Linux and media center to run on it.  II do thinkit would be cool to be able to watch video's I've captured on my PC on the livingroom TV.
I don't really need the DVD ROM for that.

What I'm finding is that the longer I fiddle with it the more I think,"wouldn't it be cool if I could also play some xbox games."  Even though I never would after the novelty wore off.(sad but true, I bought all these G-cube games and just haven't felt like playing them.

That said, I might pick up a new laser, new DVD drive or heck...I think the cheapest option...I might pick up a second xbox that has a crashed HD but a working DVD (~$15). Go figure, Xboxes are like arcade cabs...they multiply. 

[northerngames]

if you do tweak the laser pot you drop the Ohms not increase them just in case you did not know.

[knave]

if you do tweak the laser pot you drop the Ohms not increase them just in case you did not know.

LOL, I took the whole drive apart, blew out all the dust, but didn't immediatly recognise the pot.  I'm gonna have to find some illistrations...I have a samsung drive.(forgetting witch one of the three...ends with s perhaps...)

So, other news...I now have a softmoded Xbox. It took me a bit longer than it was suppose to...but trial and error (lol I did get an error) saw me through.

If it helps anyone else, The PC I was using would not read a HD if it did not detect it on at post.  So, I had to "double swap" (I made that terrm up). I connected the Xbox HD to the PC, entered the bios to stall. swappet the HD to the Xbox, started it up played and paused my music. swapped back to the PC and continued out of the Bios. (I tried it a ton of other ways till I figures this out.)  In the end it worked but I was worried since I recieved an input/ouput error when installing the mod.  When I booted the modded xbox for the first time I recieved a message that the config file was corrupt. After a reboot the file was automatically recreated with a good version.  but it's working now.

Modded Xbox...Now what 

Sigh (guess it's more reading)

I guess I have to Download the latest Version of XBMC and ftp it over to my xbox.  I might as well stick mame on ther as well.

(I played around with the settings just enough to set the Xbox to DHCP.  I hope I can still FTP to it. (I think I'll set it back to static.)  I had never used flashxp until today...not a bat ftp app.

Off to search for media center and mame...and a tut on how to install.  Eventually I might make XBMC my dash.

[slycrel]

Congrats!

Check the emulators page on xbox-scene, there are a ton.  There are also some homebrew and PC games that have been ported as well.

I have used avalaunch and unleashX for my dashboard, I've liked unleashX the best, though I think most are comparable feature-wise.

From this point it's similar to setting up a MAME cab -- you have a pseudo-PC ready, you just need to add the software that you want on it.

[bfauska]

Hey Knave,
Did you use the "Ndure Softmod Through Xboxhdm" tutorial? I've been looking around at Xbox-Scene and it seems like the most up to date tutorial for softmoding w/o any cost at all. The only other ways I know of to softmod for less money than the price of a cheap chip is to find a used copy of one of the appropriate games and hack a usb connection into my controller cable. It seems like at least as much work to do the game save softmod as doing a hotswap, and I don't think I'd benefit from a chip at all so if that's the tutorial you used and it worked I'm definitely going to give it a shot.

I'd ask these questions over at the scene, but that forum is seriously mind-numbing. I don't remember this forum being that difficult to understand when I started here, it seems like some forums are just naturally easier to navigate and decipher than others, I've always loved when I find a forum I can just slip into and find my way around quickly, avsforum, homebrewtalk and arcadecontrols all rule in my book.

[knave]

Yes that is the Tutorial that I used.  I had to modify it a bit since I used an updated version of the software but the changes were not major. 

Woohoo!  I now have XBMC and Mame running on my xbox. I threw two games on it and it played them very well. I think I'll try to stick to horizontal games though...on my TV vertical games are tiny. LOL.

Media center looks great.  I'm not exactly sure where I should store my video's on the xbox itself so I made a folder on the "E" drive since it has the most space.  I played a home movie that I had laying around and it did stutter a bit.  (I'm not sure it isn't the file though.) Eventually I need to learn how to set up a network share for my media.

The weirdest thing happened though...While I was getting ready to FTP the Game disk that I had forgotten about in the drive loaded.    I played a few minutes before deciding that I suck at hockey and proceded to transfer my files. I guess it will work about one in fifty times. No worries, I'm going to take it apart again anyhow since I've been reading up on them.  Fortunately for me It's a Samsung version B...(nice  if I get it working.) Perhaps I'll get a new laser for it.

[ChadTower]

XBMC is a great piece of software that works very, very well.  It will stream effectively off of just about any network storage you can come up with.  I use it constantly off of XP shares and sometimes just over windows workgroups.  I wouldn't bother storing stuff locally - the real strength of XBMC is the ability to store elsewhere.

[bfauska]

All good to hear. I'm planning on running movies from about 750-1250gb worth of drives in my desktop that I rarely use. I looked at some of the youtube vids of XBMC in action and it seems like it's really great to operate once it's setup. I worked for quite a while to get Xlobby running on my PC and in the end gave up (at least for a while) because I couldn't quite get flawless DVD playback, my video card is about 1 model behind the one everybody at AVSforum recommends for minimum clean DVD playback on a large display. Eventually I want to run an Xlobby PC in my theater and then use less bulky equipment to play back media in the other rooms of the house, like XBOXs, or the networked DVD players, but it looks like XBOX FTW.

[ChadTower]

The Xbox won't make a good disc player.  Both of mine suck for that.  I will go so far as to rip DVDs to my PC hard drive at times to avoid using the DVD drive.

The upconversion in XBMC is pretty good, too.  About the highest you'll want to go is 720p, but I run it on all sorts of things from downloaded divx to actual ripped DVDs and it does a very nice job.  Don't bother with 1080i - it can do that but it will freeze a lot.  Doesn't have the RAM for 1080i.

[bfauska]

My highest resolution display right now is my Infocus 4805 and it uses a Faroudja processor to de-interlace so I tend to let it do the work. It's usually better to use that than it is to even bother with a progressive scan DVD player, so I don't really need to up-convert. I suppose at some point (surprised it hasn't happened yet actually) I'll replace my living room TV with something HD, but until then I don't mind playback in 480.

[knave]

I don't think I'll be ready for HD for a long time.  that said the Xbox will be perfect for me untill then or longer.

Say, I'm reading up on setting XBMC to share and am getting some conflicting answers.  Do I have to edit the .xml file on the xbox or can I just point it to my shared folder with my video's on it and go.  My PC is running XP pro with filesharing already enabled.

[ChadTower]

If you want custom named user friendly menu entries on the Xbox, you'll need to edit the XML files.  If you want to just navigate via the network to your stuff, you can do it without editing.

[knave]

If you want custom named user friendly menu entries on the Xbox, you'll need to edit the XML files.  If you want to just navigate via the network to your stuff, you can do it without editing.

Yup I found that out the hard way...

I was able to browse the network to my shared folders but I couldn't use the SNB share option.  I need to learn what to do to configure the "custom named user friendly menu entries ". 

That said it was awesome playing my videos I even tried out the MP3 player and the slideshow options...I'm impressed.

[ChadTower]

SMB would be better suited for sharing from non-Windows machines.  If you're sharing from a windows server you wouldn't need to use that one.

[knave]

Hmmm...Well, I'm super excited to get a wireless adapter and put this in our main TV room.  Will video play ok over a wireless (G) connection? (I never really get LAN like speed over wireless so I thought I'd ask.)

I found one of these for $30 locally.

I'm really close to having this useable for ~$55 (but I still need a remote)

[ChadTower]

I bet it would but with the occasional problems all data heavy wireless clients have.  I don't have a wireless network so I can't say for sure.

[bfauska]

I've streamed DVD from PC to PC over wireless B w/o hickups, but I think I was getting lucky. I've heard that G will work fine.

[knave]

I'll find out tonight, I am gonna go grab that acess point this evening...(unless the guy flakes)  I have High hopes that it will work fine.  My wife's laptop can connect from the same location...I'm hoping the powered nature of the bridge gives it good reliability.

[ChadTower]

If you can open a movie file over the wireless LAN from that laptop, and it plays properly, odds are high it will do the same on the Xbox.

[Samstag]

Hmmm...Well, I'm super excited to get a wireless adapter and put this in our main TV room.  Will video play ok over a wireless (G) connection? (I never really get LAN like speed over wireless so I thought I'd ask.)

I stream video over a G connection on a daily basis to one of my xboxes.  Most of the stuff I stream is xvid movies ripped with AutoGK.  Whatever bitrate that uses works great 98% of the time. 

Your mileage may vary, depending on interference, bitrate, distance from the router, etc.

[richms]

Streams ok over a WDS bridge between 2 accesspoints for me, with the xbox wired to the second accesspoint, but if I take the laptop out to the garage and its running off the AP out there too it absolutly kills the bandwidth. If I cable the laptop to the AP I can browse and stream just fine.

[knave]

So I'm on to my next hurdle.  I picked up that Wireless adapter yesterday, and as fitting for an $80 item that you but for $30 it doesn't work. (I should say didn't) Caveat emptor right?

Nice thing is that was able to take out three easy to find screws, stare at the thing for 15 minutes and eventually figure out how to take it apart.  It was a super easy fix.

All is still not well though even though I have the unit working.  This one is totally my fault. (oversight) My home wireless network uses WPA and this unit only supports WEP.

(sigh) I am totally not downgrading my network security. 

I might just use this for something else and keep looking for a bridge that will work with WPA.

[ChadTower]

You don't strictly need a wireless adapter for the Xbox... just hard connect it to a WAP.  That is probably what I'd do.

[knave]

You don't strictly need a wireless adapter for the Xbox... just hard connect it to a WAP.  That is probably what I'd do.

That's pretty muchwhat this unit is.  It is just marketed to be used for the Playstation 2 and Xbox crowd.  I could use it to extend a wireless network, hook a PC or through a switch multiple units.

I'd call it a WAP-light

I briefly looked in to getting a router that is compatible with some 3rd party firmware but was hoping this would be a cheaper and easier option.  It would have been if I were not using the more advanced security.

Ultimately the cheapest solution would get me in trouble.  I have a spool of CAT-5 in the garage.  I could make whatever cable I wanted...but unless I ran it under the house I think my better half would object.  That and the kids and kittens would chew on it.

Last summer I picked up a wireless router new for $9.99 for my folks...I'll have to look into my other options.

Anyone know of an affordable Wireless acess point/bridge? Or a router that can be used asa one?

[ChadTower]

Give craigslist a shot... snag a used one.  Or just keep an eye on fatwallet and techbargains, they show up as good deals there from time to time.

Some of these aren't too badly priced.

[Hoopz]

Ultimately the cheapest solution would get me in trouble.  I have a spool of CAT-5 in the garage.  I could make whatever cable I wanted...but unless I ran it under the house I think my better half would object.  That and the kids and kittens would chew on it.

That would be relatively easy to do though.  And cost is pretty good also.  That's the route I went.