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One of my roommates was attempting to install a Xenium ice (iirc) modchip in his v1.0 xbox his cousin gave him as payment for a successful mod. He had the soldering iron plugged into the same circuit as two lamps. For normal houses this wouldn't be a big deal but in our townehouse it must have dropped the voltage or something similiar, because the soldering iron wouldn't heat up enough to melt the solder. He didn't think of that, though, so he continually applied pressure against the LPC port holes, tried desoldering braid, etc, but since he wasn't applying enough heat it did not work. He ended up fiddling for ~8 hours before giving up and in that time slipped, cracked, etc, the soldering iron against the board enough times to brick it. Some exposed traces, still haven't put enough energy into trying to fix it..
Now he has a new xbox and bricked it before it was done because he did *something* we're not sure of while installing his LED header, he couldn't just wait and cope just with the mod, nope he needed that LED header first..
We were TSOP flashing another friend's xbox, and it was the three of us in the room: me, a xbox-smart friend who helped me with the mod (owner of the two bricks previously explained), and the owner of the xbox. We finish flashing, everything went 100%, we reboot, and it's fragging. Bad flash. The owner of the xbox, who up until then at every step was like "woah.. cool!!...", etc, had a big grin on his face and was like "woah! neato! look at that flash!" while my heart was sinking.. had to buy a modchip to save that one
. Scared me because there was absolutely no feedback that the flash went wrong.. from what we could tell it was 100%