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[zynexiatech]

Just wondering if its possible to replace the xbox 360 dvdrom drive with a new one on your own should it decide to fail? if so are there any guides for this? the reason I ask is because I get the dirty disc error randomly and my console is out of warranty.

[RDC]

Yes it can be done (provided you have a drive that is "hackable" at the moment, Hitachi or Samsung) and there are several guides on it, but you'd want to try other options first before getting into all that it takes to swap the drives.

Make sure your discs are clean/in good shape.

Clean the lens.

Adjust the pot.

Replace the laser.

After all of those have been exausted replacing the drive may be the only other option. You need to extract the "key" from your old drives firmware so you can patch the new drives FW with it so it will work in your 360. That's just a real brief summary of how to swap the drives and each one has it's own way that it has to be done, but if you get this far there are plenty of tutorials on it. The Technical DVD-ROM and Modified DVD Firmware Forum has plenty of info on drive swapping and what all is involved.

[zynexiatech]

Cheers for the details, so basically if I can get another drive backup my firmware and flash it to the new drive thats it? I only need to do this extract key thing if I want to use hacked firmware?

Oh from the pics I have a Toshiba-Samsung TS-H943

This post has been edited by zynexiatech: Mar 19 2007, 09:37 PM

[RDC]

Not quite there yet. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

You only need the "key" from the old drive, but you need to dump the FW to get it. What I meant by you have to have a drive that is "hackable" is that if you had one of the new BenQ drives or other one that hasn't been hacked yet there would be no way for you to get the FW dumped and key extracted, but since you have a Sammy there's no worries on that part.

You would NOT want to flash our old drives FW to your new drive, unless it's the exact same make/model of drive. You just need to dump both drives FW, inject the old drives key into the new FW and reflash it to the new drive. Likewise, if you are going to replace the drive with a different make/model, switch from Samsung to a Hitachi or from ms25 to ms28, you'll have to "spoof" the FW so it reports that the drive is really a Samsung and the same version so the 360 will still be happy and not toss ya any E66 drive errors.

Without the key on the drive it will only play CDs and DVD movies, it will not play games at all. Each key is uniuqe to that 360/DVD, so you must have yours from the old drive to get a new drive to work 100% in it.