Print

[admiralj]

In the middle of a game of KOTOR I experienced a minor hdd head crash on the WD 120gb hdd drive i have in my xbox. I was considering replacing the drive with a WD 250gb SB drive, but after reading post after post about the hdd/eeprom marriage theory i am a little hesitant to replace the drive since i'll most likely be banned from live.

just so that im crystal clear about this - if i replace the drives i WILL most likely get banned from live right? I hope this issue only happens when i access the sectors where KOTOR is stored. maybe if i reformat the drive and copy the data back over it will not write data to the dead sectors (if there are any.) i duno.... any suggestions?

[Lord Magnus]

Basically, when you connect to XBOX Live! your hard drive and eeprom get married.

So changing any of this two things, would brake hell in the household, and M$ will assume you have a modchip, or moddified bios, and bann the hell out of you.

To avoid this, you have to change your eeprom, at the same time you install your new hard drive, and after that, your NEW virgin eeprom, and your new virgin hard drive, will get married and live happilly ever after.

Note: IF and ONLY IF you have ever been banned from XBOX Live! since June/July of 2004, you will also need a new gamertag IF you're using a big HD, and not a stock one.

Hope that was clear enough..    

[admiralj]

thanks for the info magnus. ive never been banned from live or had my gamertag flagged for using live with a large drive, since i installed the big drive (the one thats dying now) before i subscribed. so if i understand you correctly, i  hopefully wont have to worry about losing my gamertag if i install the new drive new drive/eeprom at the same time. i'll give it a shot. i might as well get a 250 or 300gb drive to replace the xbox hdd, then get an RMA on the one thats dying and use the replacement WD ships me for my ps2. heh.

[admiralj]

ok just an update:
dumped the dying hdd and purchased a wd 320gb drive. got a new eeprom from Zodiak (great seller btw). flashed the eeprom with the new one. installed the new hdd, locked it using the new eeprom, and reinstalled all apps from the old hdd to the new. went onto live today with chip off, got the infamous Modified Console message. according to the marriage theory, this should not have happened since i replaced the eeprom at the same time as the hdd install. could someone care to explain first how this happened?

second, i have one spare eeprom that i got from zodiak. since im banned, im guessing im going to have to change my gamertag as well, right? is there any way to resurrect my xbox without having to get another hdd? this 320 set me back about $215 and id rather not have to buy another drive.

WXYZ codes are currently as follows:
w: 0000-000B
x: 0000-000D
y: 00A8-6800
z: 8015-190D

btw - one odd thing i noticed about the new eeprom that i flashed my xbox with was that the dvd kit zone was set to 0 instead of the usual 1 for USA ntsc units. After flashing my xbox with this eeprom, it has the Kit Zone value has since changed to 1... If i select Load EEPROM from .BIN file within ConfigMagic with the spare eeprom i have, the DVD kit zone value changes to 2. does this mean that the xbox these eeproms were taken from were hex-edited? could this have been the reason i was banned?

[admiralj]

heh. meant to say: does this mean that these eeproms were hex-edited prior to my obtaining them?

[admiralj]

sorry for making so many posts, but this board only has about a 10 min expiration for editing previous posts.

Ive been reading up on bannings and have reaized that i may have been banned for using the same gamertag as i did with the old drive. I was never banned for using the old drive probably because i installed live after i installed that drive. still, i wonder why i was banned, because from the standpoint of ms, it should've appeared that i had simply loaded up my gamertag onto a new xbox, with a different hdd serial and eeprom than the one i was using. one thing that may have led to this was that i just did a file dump from the old drive onto the new, so maybe i should've just installed a virgin ms dash from slayers or something and signed on with live again through the on-screen prompts... i duno...

ANY help would be appreciated. i suppose if i have to get a new hdd, i can send in the 320 for an RMA and get a replacement sent out... but its a pain in the ass and id rather not have to do it unless i absolutely have to. is there anyway to get me back on live in my current situation?

[Lord Magnus]

admiralj, you should have been fine my friend... something went wrong...

Try with that new eeprom, and this time, with a new gamertag. As for the HD, I know those babys are very expensive, so what I would do, is put it back in the box, and exchange it... format it first on your pc, and take it back... if they ask you if something was wrong with the product, tell them that you want the exact same thing... you want to change it because when you installed it it made a weird noise and you didn't like it, and since you already have one just like it, and it doesn't sound like that, you figured it was defective somehow.

Good luck mate... depending on where you got it, and if you have your recipt.. everything should be cool.

Good luck mate... hope you didn't get it on the web.

[admiralj]

QUOTE(Lord Magnus @ Mar 31 2005, 09:11 PM)

admiralj, you should have been fine my friend...

[admiralj]

just out of curiosity - is calling 1-800-4MY-XBOX the only way to cancel my xbl account? I'm looking over xbox.com and i guess they dont offer an online cancel procedure.

[Lord Magnus]

Sory for the delay mate.

I believe that calling the 800 number is the only way at this time. Have your CC handy just in case they ask you for the last numbers.

About your steps for getting back on live, they're right.
I do believe that your gamertag got flagged... there's no other way of explaining what happened to you.. and I do not believe they scann your LPC points since that theory is still to be well founded.

Either way... you'll have to change hard drives every time you want to play a backup... I would suggest the simple switch on the tutorial secction, and that would make it a lot easier.

Good luck, and let me know how it went.

[admiralj]

UPDATE:
After performing what i described in the 3/31/2005 post, i am relieved to say that i now have a 320gb xbox that so far has worked 100% on live for the past 4 days. I believe what orignally got me banned was the existence of my original gamertag on the xbox after i had installed the 320gb drive and reflashed with a new eeprom. Although I never logged into Live through my gamertag, I did use the Connection Status utility in the Network Settings menu twice to check my WXYZ codes to see if I had been banned from the install. The first time i ran the utility, it connected. I didnt write down the XYZ codes tho. The second time i used the utility, which was less than 24 hours after doing it the first time, it gave me the Modified error and my Y code changed to 00A8-6800. I can only guess that the utility somehow auto-logs in using either an existing Live account installed on the system or some other type of diagnostics login. Either way, i got banned with the chip off, new hdd, new eeprom. Having cancelled that account and registered with another gamertag (and flashing with a 2nd eeprom and installing a different 320gb hdd), Live now works as it should.

WXYZ Codes are now:
W: 0000-000b
X: 0000-000d
Y: 00a8-4800
Z: 0000-0000

When flashing with the 2nd eeprom, i noticed that it had a dvd kit zone of 2 and had the ms dash time zone set to Berlin... which was probably the location of its previous owner. I used ConfigMagic and set the dvd kit zone value to 1. Im not sure if this did anything, since when i flashed with the first eeprom the dvd kit zone was set to 0 and automatically updated to 1 after i played a dvd using a region 1 ms dvd playback kit. I think all that mattered was that it was a v1.0 ntsc eeprom to match my hardware.

Another thing i noticed was that my Phantasy Star Online character data also got nuked. Come to find out that PSO also marries itself to your eeprom. The game sees the eeprom changeover as PSO data corruption and it forces you to reinitialize your PSO hdd data by deleting the existing data. In effect, you lose everything. Turning off the xbox before doing the reinitialization, I reflashed back to my original eeprom and successfully booted up the game. I then transfered my character to a mem card in hopes of importing it back with the new eeprom. No such luck however. I am now limited to only using my old character in split-screen multiplayer. I guess its all good though, my guy was only at lvl 22.

On a stranger note, I also noticed that after i got the famous "Modified Console" message, i tried to back up some game saves using the MS dash. I scrolled all the way down to the bottom where the Xbox Live gamertag data is usually stored, only to find out that there was nothing there anymore! What's more, none of my memory cards (to which i had copied my gamertag to previously)  listed my old gamertag when i viewed their contents through the ms dash. After i completed the new account creation from the 3/31 post, the Xbox Live section was re-added back to the game save list and my new gamertag was visible on the hdd, as well as my old gamertag on the memory cards. Is this odd or what? Does getting your xbox banned somehow force-remove or force-hide all traces of your old gamertag?

Anyhow the system is working beautifully now. Major thanks to Lord Magnus for his superb posts and to Zodiak for the eeproms.

[Lord Magnus]

By the way... how did you go about exchanging your banned HD?

Glad you got it working.  

[FoxRacR17]

Glad to hear you got it working for you.  I'm about to mod a xbox for a friend and he has already gone on live and still wants to be able to play on live.  I already have a virgin eeprom for him from one of my tsoped xboxs.  But i have a question, i heard that if you do account recovery with the new eeprom and new hdd its a little bit safe because its like your recovering on a new xbox.  Is this true? will it hurt any if i do this?

[admiralj]

magnus - I made use of the warranty on the banned hdd and created an RMA with western digital (i said the disk had developed bad sectors). a replacement hdd arrived about 2 days later.

foxracr - yeah i was wondering about account recovery myself. from what i was able to gather from xbox.com, account recovery is used in the case where you accidently delete your gamertag from your xbox and want to restore the account by redownloading it from MS's servers, as opposed to restoring it from your memory card. they also say that you can use it to go on live with a friend's xbox by recovering the acount to their xbox, again by downloading the account from MS instead of copying the account over from your mem card. the only thing is that if you use account recovery, you'll be asked to enter your credit card info. the recovered account will then be active only on the xbox that you recovered it to. so if you recovered it to a friend's xbox, then tried to use the account on your xbox, it won't work. you'd have to do the recovery procedure again on your xbox to enable your account on your system. (and likewise, if your friend now tried to use your account on their xbox, it wouldn't work for them anymore.)

when i was on the phone with the ms rep to cancel my account, he also said that if i wanted to i could give (or sell) my live gamertag to a friend. the account recovery procedure would then be used in this case to transfer ownership of my gamertag to the other person's xbox. once on his xbox, i'd go into the payment options and change the info to match his credit card.

I wonder if the account recovery will work in your case. I'd imagine that if the gamertag that is being recovered is not flagged (and if you are using an eeprom/hdd that have never been on Live), it will probably work. Unless I'm mistaken, it should seem as if you simply transferred your account to a friend's xbox via the account recovery procedure. I probably should have tried it myself when i replaced the dying 120gb with the 320gb drive. But instead i just copied the disk data from one drive to the other. Since i got the Modded Consle message from using the diagnostics util, instead of actually logging into live with my account, im not sure if my gamertag was ever actually flagged. But i decided it best to not use account recovery when i got the replacement 320gb drive, and instead, created a new gamertag.

If you have any success with the account recovery, let us know.

[FoxRacR17]

Thanks for the info bro.  I went to xbox.com myself and checked it out and what i got from is is that after you do account recovery all other copies become invalid.  

QUOTE

When you download your account using Account Recovery, all other copies of that account are invalidated. For example, if you saved your account to an Xbox Memory Unit (MU), and you use Account Recovery to download your account to the console, you must recopy your account to the MU before you can use it to sign in again.

 So if i'm right i could still use account recovery and put the recovered account on a mem card again and put it on another xbox if need be.  But its all good because its a friends xbox and he only plays live on his xbox so he wouldnt need his account on anyone elses xbox.  I just dont want him to get banned, he bought a year sub and is only about a month and a 1/2 into it.