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[pagejames]

Hi all,
I've spent more than a couple of hours trying to hunt down a solution to this problem, but all I can seem to find is info on the regular E68 error.
Here's what I've got:

A friend's XBox360 (stock, NOT modded) was giving him open tray errors. So I opened up his Liteon 7 series drive and noticed that the laser assembly had moved all the way to the back of the drive (furthest from the spindle) and seemed to be stuck there. So I pushed the assembly back to the spindle, cleaned the lens and any dust out of the drive, reassembled it and everything worked great.
About a month later, he had the same problem only this time after giving the open tray error for a while in the dashboard, the XBOX dashboard would freeze up. So I opened it up and the laser assembly once again moved to the back of the drive. (Both times he had been playing a retail Modern Warfare 2 disk. I believe he plays online.). So put the laser back again but this time when I booted it, the XBOX boot logo came on and stayed longer than usual. The center green light was flashing rapidly during the startup sequence (revolving green lights) and continued to do so until the system went E68. The secondary code is 1010.
I know this indicates a hard drive failure, but there is no hard drive attached. Everything I can find on this problem all suggests to either take off and put the hard drive back on or replace a bad hard drive. As I said, there is no hard drive attached.
So this is what I've done so far:
-Reflowed the cpu/gpu/southbridge/scalar(ana)/ram chips.
-Reflowed the hard drive port and the chip behind it (I believe it's the tsop chip)
-Flashed another stock liteon drive with his key and tested to see if the dvd drive was causing the problem
-Used the wireless controller to turn on the system while holding the "Y" button (supposed to restore factory settings or something)
-Held down the sync button while booting to try and clear any bad updates

No matter what, when I turn it on I get Flashing Green Center Power Light during bootup, the 4 outer green lights do their little dance and the XBox 360 logo shows up. It sits with the logo there for a while (not frozen since the highlights still move around the ball) then goes to E68 screen with bottom right red light flashing. Through all this, the center green light continues to flash rapidly.
I've also read that the automatic update may solve the problem, but I can NOT get to the dashboard.

I'm now officially at a loss for what to do.
Any and all help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance,
James