Just because you can't get it to work doesn't mean there's something wrong with it. Also, there really isn't even another choice anyway. This isn't an idiot-proof process (very unfortunately), and many people, myself included, had issues getting it installed. You just have to stick with it.
You need to run your dumps through a program called degraded to see if you have bad blocks. Bad Blocks refer to physically defective sectors on the NAND chip that cannot be properly read or written to by either the host device or external reader.
To check for bad blocks, you need to run your NAND dump through a tool called degraded. If you have bad blocks, get the program called "Bad Block Mover" which will automatically remap bad blocks in your XBR image which you then flash to your console. If your NAND chip is larger than 16MB I believe you must find a tutorial for doing bad block remapping manually.
In response to thwack, I personally was only able to get XBR working on my console by not flashing config sectors. I have also seen this echoed through the forum quite often. If it doesn't work with config, try without; and vice versa. To the OP, this only applies if you have an NTSC console. If you don't then you have to flash the config sectors, otherwise you might have strange issues.