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[toastNyk]

here's how I got my xchip installed in my xbox 1.6b.  

I got my xchip three weeks ago.. and was eager to get it installed.  I sat down with the install PDF from eb2k, my trusty soldering iron, and some cat5 wire and thought i could get it done.. boy was i wrong.

1. FLASH THE XCHIP FIRST.  don't even install it before flashing it.  The chip comes with a generic test BIOS (Cromwell) that will kill your 1.6x box (so i'm told) if your xbox with it on the xchip.  You need the Exolution X (EvoX) M8 or M8+ for the 1.6 (called like M8_16.bin or M8plus_16) BIOS for this chip and the 1.6b xbox.  Have fun finding it.  Found mine through www.xbins.org, but you may have good luck through the P2P scene.  Follow the instructions in the XControl PDF manual to get connected to the XChip.  Once connected ignore the manual when it says to do the "Load Raw" option to load your BIOS, this is only for flashing your whole 4Mb chip.  just righ click on one of the 256Kb banks and load the BIOS, then assign it the boot option. Now you can install the chip.

2. Do yourseld a favor.. get the right tools.  Go to Radio Shack and buy the smallest tip for your iron they have.  Then buy some 30 gage wire.. stuff is great.  You'll also need some really small pliars to hold the freekin tiny wire, i wiped the resin off my hemostats and used them!  and lastly DONT use rosin core solder.. it makes a mess of the circuit board, save that for your 14 gauge projects.  They have this stuff called Silver Bearing Solder.. it's so cool.. it's meant for stuff like this.

3. Follow the EB2k instructions for installing the pin header.  IMPORTANT, make sure to solder all the pins to the board.  I don't think that the instructions say to do this, but if you look at the pics of the board "all wired up" you see all the pins have been soldered to the board.  for two weeks i was troubleshooting a problem I had with the box FRAGing and no red light when all it was was the stupid pin#2 (Ground) wasn't connected!! AHHH.

4. solder the four wires and then connect the +5V and D0 wired.. that's it for the install.  you should now see the pink EvoX emblem on the screen when booting.  All the chip does is allow you to run code that wasn't signed (blessed) by MS.

5. Now you need to install the dashboard so we can actually do some thing.  you can just download any dashboard and put it on a CD-RW/DVD-R and it boot to it, but to copy it to the HD and format the drives (you did get a bigger drive to load games onto didn't you?) you need a BIG FAT bag of apps that are hard to find.. but don't worry.  This dude named Slayer and some friends (i love big geeks.. that's what makes all this possible.. big geeks) make a cool boot disk with everything you need.. you just need to find it!  It's called commonly Slayers 2.6 FINAL, or something like that.  Just get it (see #1 above about xbins.org) and download it.  It's a 158Mb .exe file that extracts a 300+Mb .iso file.  Use Nero to burg this image file to a disk, making sure to use the 'burn image file' option instead of just burning a disk with the file on it.  Always finalize the CD and use Disk-at-once instead of Track-at-once to burn.  I've heard that the DVD drives in the xboxes are finiky about the disks they read.  I've heard of success with Memorex CD-Rs, most CD-RW, and DVD-R disks.  Personally i used a cheepo Hypernedia CD-RW disk and it worked like a charm.  

6. now that you have the xbox booted up to the Slayers menu you can just do the Full install option.  Follow the prompts and you're all set.  You're now ready to either copy the games from the DVD drive to the HD with PxHDDLoader or FTP them from your PC.  If you have a friend with an bunch of games on their xbox then you can just FXP from once xbox to the other with something like FlashFXP.  

Hope this helps.. i'm just a noob that has beat his head on the wall and got it to work.  Good luck to all you modders.  i got lots of direction from this forum and others, so I just wanted to do my part.