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[catchthabeat]

Hey Scene, I have a strange 360 here, wondering if anyone can shed some light. I've put this in this section b.c I believe it's a corrupt boot or nand, and not a rrod error.

I bought a Falcon/Jasper 360 on ebay this week, listed as it "froze during boot". Received the unit, and booted it up. It seems to power up just fine, but about 3 seconds in to the boot up xbox logo animation it freezes. It does this at exactly the same place, every time. I have never got it to go to the dash.Doesn't seem to make a difference whether it is warm or cold. It switches on, the ROL appears to spin around normally. It doesn't have any RROD or any secondary error code. Eject and sync buttons work (press the sync button and the lights spin round. press it again and it stops. The DVD drive appears to spin up normally and you can hear the laser reading the disc. Fans sound normal, they adjust their speed if the unit is warm after several boot up attempts. Power supply lights appear to be normal.

Also, it seems there are marks that someone tried to read/write the nand...could this be it?

Things I have tried:

• cleaned and reapplied thermal paste, re-seating heat sinks and x-clamp repaired
• reflowed the console, cpu, gpu, and hana/ana chip

Once again, no rrod or errors, it just freezes at the exact same time (boot of x logo, pre kinect dash).

Do you think the nand is corrupt? If so could I read it and maybe adjust or swap the kernel? Or rebuild my nand? Thx scene!

[Faluke]

I had a similiar problem when I was building the nand for a Jasper 16mb incorrectly. When i flashed it to the system it would only "half boot".

I suggest dumping the nand and attempting a JTAG yourself. You probably have a botched attempt to put Freeboot on the nand or something.

Have you checked to see whether the system can boot xellous via eject button? You may be able to salvage this thing by getting your CPU key.

[catchthabeat]

QUOTE(Faluke @ Dec 3 2010, 12:05 PM)

I had a similiar problem when I was building the nand for a Jasper 16mb incorrectly. When i flashed it to the system it would only "half boot".

I suggest dumping the nand and attempting a JTAG yourself. You probably have a botched attempt to put Freeboot on the nand or something.

Have you checked to see whether the system can boot xellous via eject button? You may be able to salvage this thing by getting your CPU key.

You know, I don't even know if it is jtaggable. I can't get passed the boot "x spinning" to see the dash. I guess i'll have to plug in my nifty usb reader and check the kernel. So you think its a corrupt boot/dash file/nand lol?

[catchthabeat]

Well, it's a Falcon with CB 5771. So no jtag for me. Weird thing is I got an error reading the nand 3 times.

QUOTE

ERROR 250: reading block 1F8
ERROR 250: reading block 225
3FF

Could this be the reason why the 360 will not boot all the way? Or, could it be a cold solder/bridged connection somewhere? If it could be a faulty update, anyway I could remake my nand, w.o bad blocks? Or use an alternate?

[Aldanga]

Those errors wouldn't cause the issues as the 360 remaps bad blocks. They're very common and don't cause problems--at least as far as my experience goes.

I've seen similar issues on dying consoles. It could be that it's close to death, but not quite to the edge. However, your note that it has marks from being read by USB/LPT is interesting. You could try to remake a NAND image that matches your motherboard and fuse lines, but there's no guarantee it would work. It's really a conundrum at this point.

[catchthabeat]

QUOTE(Aldanga @ Dec 3 2010, 08:42 PM)

Those errors wouldn't cause the issues as the 360 remaps bad blocks. They're very common and don't cause problems--at least as far as my experience goes.

I've seen similar issues on dying consoles. It could be that it's close to death, but not quite to the edge. However, your note that it has marks from being read by USB/LPT is interesting. You could try to remake a NAND image that matches your motherboard and fuse lines, but there's no guarantee it would work. It's really a conundrum at this point.

Hmm well Im glad its not there errors than. And yes interesting, though there are no marks of jtag wiring, just of the read/write location of the nand. Maybe he just wanted to see if it was jtaggable? So, possibly he could list it that way on eBay?

As for remaking the nand image the way you explained, is it difficult? Do you have a tutorial I could look at or maybe the time to type out the steps? Thx for your reply!

[Aldanga]

I don't have experience with creating a new stock NAND image. I've heard of it done, but don't know much about it. Not very many people have ever had to utilize the option, I'm afraid. Sorry I can't be of more help in that area.

[catchthabeat]

QUOTE(Aldanga @ Dec 3 2010, 10:48 PM)

I don't have experience with creating a new stock NAND image. I've heard of it done, but don't know much about it. Not very many people have ever had to utilize the option, I'm afraid. Sorry I can't be of more help in that area.

Oh hey, your the one I asked a liteon pcb for lol! And ahh ok, all is good. I guess I'll have to do some more research. I appreciate it though.

Also, is this possible without it being exploitable? For example, not having the cpu key.

[Aldanga]

Yeah. I figure all you'd have to do would be to extract the required files from your image and inject them into a valid image of the same type and fuse set. I don't think it would be very complicated.

[catchthabeat]

Does anyone have a spare nand or know how to do this? Thanks.

[tk_saturn]

Bad blocks can develop after the console has left the factory, and sometimes aren't marked as bad. If you run a full dashboard update where it rewrites the entire NAND, it will mark that block as bad and remap it.

I'm sure someone mentioned somewhere that if there's a single error, the console can use the ECC data so it knows what the original data in the bad block would be.

A bad block at 3FF looks bad too.

I'd do a couple of dumps, make sure they match. Then run them through XNandHelaer 0.6 and see what it says regarding bad ECC and Bad Blocks.

While you won't be able to use someones else NAND, it may be possible to copy those bad blocks from someone elses NAND (provided it has the same dashboard ersion and CB) depending what data is in them, and then manually remap and perform a dashboard update. You'd have to compare their blocks in a Hex Editor, or xNandHealer has an option to view the raw data of the NAND.

[catchthabeat]

QUOTE(tk_saturn @ Dec 12 2010, 12:14 AM)

Bad blocks can develop after the console has left the factory, and sometimes aren't marked as bad. If you run a full dashboard update where it rewrites the entire NAND, it will mark that block as bad and remap it.

I'm sure someone mentioned somewhere that if there's a single error, the console can use the ECC data so it knows what the original data in the bad block would be.

A bad block at 3FF looks bad too.

I'd do a couple of dumps, make sure they match. Then run them through XNandHelaer 0.6 and see what it says regarding bad ECC and Bad Blocks.

While you won't be able to use someones else NAND, it may be possible to copy those bad blocks from someone elses NAND (provided it has the same dashboard ersion and CB) depending what data is in them, and then manually remap and perform a dashboard update. You'd have to compare their blocks in a Hex Editor, or xNandHealer has an option to view the raw data of the NAND.

Good grief this sounds complicated lol. Maybe I'll just go ahead and sell it now. And to the above post I figured so..not being able to do anything with the cpu key. I think I'm going to try to reflow it first, especially the ram areas.

[ddsdavey]

How do bad blocks "develop"?!
I always thought that bad blocks were essentially just spares or blank blocks deliberately placed at point of manufacture by Samsung etc.?
I didnt realise they developed afterwards,what triggers this deteriation you mention?

[Aldanga]

Check out these two links. From my understanding, basically the sector in the memory wears out when the transistor fails. It might still be able to be read at that point, but it cannot generally be written to. So if the block needs to be changed and it cannot be, it is marked as a bad block and not used in the future.

[JeffJ2]

QUOTE(tk_saturn @ Dec 12 2010, 07:10 PM)

I have JTAG'ed 5 Jasper Elites, 4 I dumped with 7367, ad the last 7371 ( it has an unmapped bad block) If I compare the 4 7367 NANDs though quickpar, of out 1056 16KB blocks, only 41 or 42 are unique. Even the one on the 7371, it's still only missing 564 blocks. I can get 200-300 matching blocks from a Falcon NAND.  

So what exactly is stopping someone swapping those identical blocks bewteen consoles? I could swap those indentical blocks between those consoles without issues.

Explain that lol.

If there are only 41-42 unique 16KB blocks out of 1056, there's not a chance the whole NAND is encrypted.

I was under the understanding that the whole nand was hashed with the cpu key. Encrypted was a poor choice of words.