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[wookee9]

Hello all,
This is my first post here. Thanks to all the people who have posted up lots of really helpful stuff on this forum. Really appreciate it.

I'm hoping someone could help me shed some light on this problem. I've trawled all through this forum, and xbox hackers, xbox scene, but haven't found any solid answers. I'm stumped.

I bought a Falcon 360 mfr date 2008-08-19 on ebay last week, listed as faulty. Recieved 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. It has never booted a game, dvd or cd. Just hangs at this same place every time. I could do it 100 times, and its always the same. Doesn't seem to make a difference whether it is warm (i've been running it with the cover off, can feel the heatsink getting warm) or cold.

I made a video of the boot up here:

(that sound at 4 secs is me clearing my throat, not the xbox, lol)

Notice how the sound seems to stop after about a second, but the video carries on. Also it seems to flicker or judder very slightly twice at the same time the sound stops.

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.

When i got the unit, it had clearly been opened. Some of the tabs and screw heads were a bit mashed up, a few were broken off  It looked as though someone had tried to replace the thermal paste on the gpu, and used way too much. Cleaned all that up.

Things I have tried so far:
- Booted holding down sync button
- Booted with and without discs in drive
- Pulling all cables out, leaving it to cool, restarting.
- Booted with system update disc in drive, also tried on USB stick. Never began installation. Made no difference.
- Checked that the DVD drive is plugged in properly.
- Tried booting without the DVD drive plugged in, to see if bad firmware in the drive could be causing it. This made absolutely no difference. Still froze at same place. Also, am I now banned from live for doing this?
- Installed heat sinks on all the exposed ram chips, hana, southbridge, nand, added 1mm washers and paste to the ram under the gpu heat sink. No difference.
- installed fan shroud splitter mod. No difference.
- Removed original x clamps. Cleaned chips, and applied OCZ Freeze. Sanded down chassis to correct height, Installed Hybrid X clamp. I did not use the x clamps, i made my own .75mm aluminium plate exactly like the Advanced one. Made no difference. At least the board is flat now.
- Tried many tweaks with screw tightening / loosening. Made no difference.
- Penny fix, and pressing on the ram chips slightly during boot. Made no difference. Altho when applying pressure to the hana the screen goes greyscale. Still freezes at the same place tho.
- Even the bloody eraser fix! no difference.

Note. I fu*ked up installation of hybrid xclamp initially. I incorrectly measured the height of the washers, installed one too many. The heat sinks didn't bed down properly, and I overheated the unit. Fans went mental, video very quickly died, system shut down and it gave 2 RROD, error 0022. So I took the Heatsinks off, realised my mistake. Put the correct washers on, checked and double checked all measurements with the micrometer, checked the heatsinks had an imprint of paste on the underside. Put it all back together. Booted. 3 RROD error 0110. WTF? Took it apart, this time, I noticed a tiny Surface Mounted Capacitor under the GPU was hanging off! I think I must of dislodged this with the foam pads under the hybrid xclamp plate. So i got out the needle point soldering iron, positioned and and held it down with a scalpel blade and successfully soldered it back on. Rebooted, and I was back to the original problem of it freezing after a few seconds. LOL!

I also noticed lots of solder points on the board that had holes in them. So I got the magnifying glass and Soldering Iron out again and I carefully reflowed every single bad one I could see, careful not to bridge anything. Took bloody ages. Booted up again, made absolutely no difference. At least I didn't fu*k anything up it seems.

Only thing I haven't tried is a complete reflow, oven or heat gun. I'm nervous about doing this, especially as I think given the symptoms its looking more and more like a firmware problem. Is this possible?

I am thinking perhaps the person who had it before me had attempted to flash the drive or nand. Now i don't know very much about this. But perhaps this would explain why they didn't want to send it to MS to be fixed, and broke the warranty seal. If the firmware is corrupt, and I have no back up of it... I am screwed aren't I.

Has anyone flashed their drive or nand and got these symptoms before? Could a flashed drive do this?

I found a few threads, where the guy was saying basically he had managed to fix it by reflowing. And the other guy said it was firmware, and there was no way to fix it.
http://www.xboxhacke...hp?topic=9399.0
http://www.xboxhacke...p?topic=10496.0
http://www.xboxhacke...p?topic=10172.0
http://www.xboxhacke...p?topic=10127.0

Unlike some of these, i never make it to the dash or load games.

Can anyone shed any light on this at all? Thanks!

(and sorry for the stupidly long post)