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[l11l1VeNoM1l11l]

I'm hoping someone on here can help me.  Here are my symptoms:

- Xbox will initially power on and boot normally.

- After a while, I hear a "click."  The same click that is heard when I turn my Xbox off, which I'm pretty sure is the hard drive turning off.  It has always made this click sound with every HDD I've installed.  I've never had any problems with hard drives inside it before, I just keep upgrading to larger capacity disks.  However, after using Maxtor, Seagate AND Western Digital while always hearing the same sound upon shutdown, it leads me to believe it may be the sound that my modchip makes when it turns off.  (Xecuter 2)

- Once this click occurs and the Xbox is still powered, it locks up completely.  The first time it happened, I came home, turned it on, and heard the click.  About 2 seconds later, XBMC completely locked up.  Scrolling newsfeed frozen, no controller input, etc.  I turned the Xbox off, turned it back on, and everything was fine.  I immediately started diagnosing my hard drive by playing DOOM 3.  I figured if there's one game that uses the HDD to its fullest, its that one.  Played through for about an hour with no problems.  Soft-reset the box by holding the triggers and the back and black buttons.  As soon as it went back to XBMC, it clicked again and froze the same way.

- I recreated that problem multiple times.  Upon initial startup, it will be fine, but after a soft reset and returning to the XBMC home screen, it clicks and freezes.

- The other day I had left the box on for about an hour.  XBMC started up the starfield screensaver.  It displayed it for about 30 minutes until I heard the click.  The screen saver kept going until I tried to navigate away from it - then it just locked up mid-screensaving.


I definitely want to fix this.  I am completely capable of getting a new drive and cloning or even starting from scratch if I have to.  My problem is that I'm not sure if it's the drive or the chip.

Anyone ever have anything like this happen before?

And it's just 1 click, not multiple clicks like the HDDs normally do.  If it is the HDD, it's simply powering off very prematurely.

Any help is greatly appreciated and thanks in advance!

[Heimdall]

Modchips don't click. It sounds like the drive, but it also sounds like it's only happening while XBMC is running, which makes it sound less like a hardware problem and more like a settings problem. Check the disk control settings in XBMC - under Settings - System - Harddisk. Make sure the two spindown settings are set to Off, Acoustic Management set to Fast, Power management level set to High Power, and see if that makes any difference.

[lordvader129]

you may also want to try a different PSU if you can, it may be cutting power or dropping voltage to the HDD (the click is definitely the HDD, it happens when it shuts off and the read/write arm snaps back to its "home" position)

as heimdall said, modchips dont click (no moving parts)

[l11l1VeNoM1l11l]

Ahah!  Now that you mention the PSU, I think you might be right.  The hard drive is pretty new, so I don't think its wearing down just yet.  All of the other hardware (except for the DVD-ROM) is totally original, and seeing as how this is the first model Xbox ever, the PSU is probably starting to choke.

I'll check the settings in XBMC, but I doubt that's causing it because I've never changed them and they've been the same for a good 6 years now.  This Xbox has been very heavily used as it was our main source of digital entertainment since I modded it.

Thanks for the suggestions, guys.  I'm probably going to replace the PSU on Monday to see if that does the trick.  Beats going through the trouble of replacing the hard drive when I might not have to.

[l11l1VeNoM1l11l]

Argh.  I hate diagnosing figity hardware.  I can't even get the thing to screw up at all today lol.

I did do some research though and found out that modchips in Xboxes typically shorten the lifespan of the PSU, so I'm going to say that the PSU is probably to blame.  My first thought was that the hard drive was losing power.  Based on that and what you guys told me here, I'm going to have to replace the power supply.

Anyone have an extra xbox psu laying around?

[Heimdall]

QUOTE(l11l1VeNoM1l11l @ Sep 5 2010, 01:49 AM)

I did do some research though and found out that modchips in Xboxes typically shorten the lifespan of the PSU

Really? Where did you get that from?

[Bomb Bloke]

In theory, they'd draw slightly more power, which might reduce the lifespan... by up to a few minutes, perhaps.

XBMC doesn't access the HDD if it doesn't need to. The single "click" will be the drive head being parked due to lack of use. My bet is the HDD is doing this automatically, without permission from the console; when XBMC wants to read the HDD again, it finds it's not longer awake, and so it crashes. Check the power saving settings in XBMC anyway, but don't assume that the drive is obeying them.

Some XBMC skins (eg MC360) have persistent animations which cause XBMC to constantly access the HDD. Wouldn't surprise me if the problem doesn't occur with those running, but I suspect that if you want a "proper" fix, you'll need to put some research into your drive's "feature" list. Odds are it's a "power saving" feature, and odds are there's a utility available to turn it off.

[l11l1VeNoM1l11l]

The lifespan "issue" I read about was for 1.6 version chipped boxes.  I'm almost positive my Xbox is the very first to ever come out, so I'm not sure if it even remotely pertains to mine.  It even came with "brackets" pre-installed on the board that allow additional ram chips to be inserted without any soldering.  I will take pictures of it as soon as I take it apart.  I posted something on here around a year ago about it and no one ever heard of anything like it.  I've owned this box since the day I bought it at Best Buy (literally when it launched) and I haven't done any hardware mods other than the modchip itself.

As for the drive settings, unless something deep became corrupt, I doubt that's the problem.  I've had this drive in it for a few months now and I've used the box daily, often letting it sit for hours with the XBMC screen saver showing.  It's never crashed like this or clicked at all before.

I use a modified version of PMIII as a skin (new pictures, icons, and layouts), which constantly loads pictures from the HDD at the home page.  That's where it seems to crash, but I've always used the same skin and it hasn't caused any problems until recently.

The funny thing is that I left it unplugged for about 4 days until the day after my first post in this thread.  Since I plugged it back in, it hasn't caused any problems, which again leads me to believe that it's the power supply that's starting to burn out.  My old VPR Matrix Pentium 4 desktop likes to do the same thing.  Sometimes it won't turn on at all, but if switch the PSU off for about 5 minutes and try again it will work perfect for a few weeks until I have to do it again.  (Yes, I could change the PSU in that too, but I only use that PC to play Doom when I'm bored in my workshop).  Then again, the problem with the box could have been a BIOS feature that got screwed up somehow and magically reset after I let it sit powerless for a few days.

Lol, it's just frustrating that I can't get it to do it again because now I'm constantly paranoid that it's going to crash on me in the middle of a movie or game.  I love this Xbox because I've had it forever.  I even talked to my girlfriend about being buried with it if I die.  Told her it was probably the most impressive "computer" I've ever owned and always the most useful.  I think about it as a really loyal dog.  Now that I know something's wrong with it and I can't figure it out, I'm constantly thinking about it.  I'm definitely not ready to put it down.  For crying out loud I bought a 360 and sold it a few weeks later because (even with a brand new 1 year subscription to Live and a ton of better looking games) I still played the original box a lot more.  It's just more fun being in full control of your game console and the games that you have INSTALLED on it.  Modding soundtracks, playing with textures, etc.

Anyway, I really appreciate all of the feedback, guys!  I'm going to screw around with it more.  I took it easy on it and decided to stop screwing with it when I initially thought it was the HDD because I didn't want to abuse it and eventually lose all of my data by killing the HDD completely.  Now that I think it's the PSU I'm even more weary because I don't want to stress any of the hardware out, but I'm going to play around with it more now that it's seemingly "healthy" again.  I'm going to replace the PSU tomorrow being I have the day off and use it alllllllllllllll day.

I'll post the results soon to let you guys know how it goes.  I'm really relieved to see that people (you guys) are still as committed to the original Xbox as I am.  I like to think of it as the Commodore of my generation.

I'll try to get back on here tomorrow.  We adopted a new (actual) dog and have to keep an eye on her tomorrow to make sure she gets along okay with the rest of our animals.  So between that, replacing my PSU, and diagnosing the box (and drinking a ton of beer throughout all of it), it might be difficult to get online.  But if not I'll post the pics of the board here and in my other thread if I can find it within a week.

Happy Labor Day!

[l11l1VeNoM1l11l]

QUOTE(obcd @ Sep 6 2010, 12:24 AM)

You could temporary install the harddisk in your pc and use a manufacturer diagnostic program to check it out. If it has some bad areas or other issues, they should show up in that program.

Maybe you have a corrupt image on your harddisk and the xbmc dashboard crashes when it tries to load it. This could explain why it sometimes can run a long time without crashing.

Another important issue of the harddisk is heat. Some disks heat up a lot more than the original xbox harddisk. The cooling of the xbox is not as good as the cooling of a pc case.

The xbox supply has some extra power for addianal gadgets. If you connect 4 controllers, you need power for all 4. If you connect a memory device, you need power for that one as well.

Sometimes, bigger harddisk drain more power. When this is the case, things usually go wrong at startup when the disk starts to spin, as it is drawing most power at that moment.

Most supply problems are caused by bad capacitors. The ripple on the voltage rails increases and the system starts to run less stable. If things go worse, the system suddenly won't boot anymore.

regards.

I'm not sure what program I could use to diagnose a drive formatted in FatX.  I've never tried it before, but if Western Digital's diagnostics can test hardware regardless of the file system, then I will give it a go.

As for a corrupt image, I'm ruling that out.  The drive shut off while the screen saver was being displayed about a half hour into it, and the box froze when I pressed the B button to return to the screen.  So, as soon as XBMC tried to access data from the drive, it wasn't powered on to respond.

I've thought about the amount of heat the Xbox undergoes as well, but I've used it in the same spot with the same configuration for years and never experienced problems.  I've also never noticed the temp gauges in XBMC ever go above normal.

I will agree with you about the size of the disk and the amount of power it is trying to consume.  It could be that the drive finally wore the power supply down.  This drive has only been in this console for a few months, and it does seem to shut down the most when either the Xbox is turned on for a while and left inactive, when it first turns on for the first time in days, or when it tries to soft-reset after playing a game.  This leads me to believe that when the disk is initially "spinning up" it asks for a bit more than the PSU can handle.  So, yes, I still believe it is a power supply issue.

I hope what you said about the capacitors on the board isn't the case.  It would make sense, considering this box is the oldest one I've ever seen taken apart and it's about time the board gave out, but I'm hoping that's not the problem.  I didn't notice any visible damage to any hardware when I inspected it yesterday, but I wasn't looking extremely closely at the capacitors.  I was focused more on the HDD and the PSU (and the cable that connects the two).  I'll have to take another look tomorrow.

I still haven't replaced the PSU.  I had 2 extra boxes without HDDs that I was going to swap a PSU from, but it turns out that they are newer and incompatible with my board's PSU port (go figure).  So, I guess I'll have to order one.  Lol I do still have 3 of my friends' Xboxes that they never picked up from my house after a retro Halo party I had about a year ago.  I could be sheisty if it comes down to it.  In fact...yup.  That's what I'm doing.  Sorry, Kyle, if you read this - your Xbox PSU is now my lab rat.