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[petegas]

This is common sense but is a post for all the n00bs or careless people out there . . .

I installed a Xenium in my buddies box, and he's fairly new the the Xbox scene.  I told him about how great the xenium was because you dont' have to worry about bad bios flashes, blah blah blah, and to just play around as he pleased.  I also set up EVO-X for him and a couple apps.

One thing I didn't think of was that he'd choose the 'restore EEPROM' menu option in XOS before ever choosing to 'backup EEPROM'.  Now I would have figured that the Xenium would at least set a flag or something when the EEPROM is backed up to prevent what happened, but apparantly not.  So yup, he wiped his eeprom with whatever garbage happened to ship in the Xenium's EEPROM backup address range.

Since his HD was locked, of course he got the ol' Error 6 whenever he tried to boot anything as the HD lock key was no more.  just by luck, when I installed evo-x for him I backed up his eeprom onto the c:\ drive, and backed it up onto PC.  

The newest beta of XBTool has the ability to embed EEPROM into the BIOS, which got the box back up so we could flash his eeprom back with good data.

Not sure if this has changed in XoS 1.1, but it would be handy to be able to flash eeprom from CD in XOS.

[Artifex]

XOS checks to see if there is a valid eeprom backup on each boot.  If not, it takes a backup of the eeprom.  It should not be possible to "restore" an eeprom that hasnt been backed up yet.

After a couple of reports of this, however, it's not something we're just going to ignore.  We will add in some additional precautions, but as there doesnt seem to be a bug there to fix, we suspect that something else may be the culprit in these cases.

--Artifex

[warbeast]

also there is already a cromwell bios out that will work with a broken xbox/blank epprom and restore it from the dvd drive it cant be that hard to add this to the xos

[petegas]

QUOTE (Artifex @ Feb 26 2004, 07:16 PM)

XOS checks to see if there is a valid eeprom backup on each boot.  If not, it takes a backup of the eeprom.  It should not be possible to "restore" an eeprom that hasnt been backed up yet. After a couple of reports of this, however, it's not something we're just going to ignore.  We will add in some additional precautions, but as there doesnt seem to be a bug there to fix, we suspect that something else may be the culprit in these cases. --Artifex

'as there doesnt seem to be a bug there to fix, we suspect that something else may be the culprit in these cases.'

- if the Xenium is supposed to take a valid backup of the eeprom on XOS boot if one does not exist, then there is a bug, as this did not happen!  I don't know what else could be considered a culprit in this case, as the XOS is the first thing to come up when powering on your box.  

I'm glad to hear this isn't supposed to happen, anyway.  Being an engineer myself I know how hard something like this can be to track down and fix if you cannot reproduce it in your dev lab.

If this helps in any way, the very first time I powered up the box after the install the Xenium did not power up properly because of a bad solder join on one of the pinheader pins.  Is it possible that this caused corrupt data to 'backed up' instead of the valid eeprom, and then after that the xenium did not attempt to back up the eeprom because it thought it had valid data?

[oblox]

I'm no programmer (well not of x-boxes yet ) but I don't see why it's not possiable to do:

XOS Boot
Check for valid eeprom
Non found
Check CD/HD for copy of backup valid eeprom
Found
Backup to Xenium

Then you already have reflash options on there

EDIT the one maybe difficult thing would be an option save eeprom to HD

[petegas]

QUOTE (oblox @ Feb 27 2004, 12:11 PM)

EDIT the one maybe difficult thing would be an option save eeprom to HD

Evo-x has long had the ability to backup eeprom to HD - this isn't a hard process.  I strongly agree with the necessity to be able to recover eeprom from a CD/DVD.

Since not being able to access your HD is one of the symptoms of fuxoring your eeprom (if it is locked), the HD should be left out of the backup process in this case.

[rahula]

eeprom thing is something you should not mess with. Especially if you don't know what you really doing. A friend of mine just play around ith my box and got into configmagic and messed up by eeprom big time. I import the backup but still didn't work. Luckly,I once backup my eeprom and print out all numer on a piece of paper. So I edit manually ( pain in the arse and the edition is worse than cell phone text messaging) to revive my xbox to play live. Since then I remove that application from my dash and only boot from a cd.

[oblox]

I'm just saying about the xenium backing up to HD for people because it would probably be a one click process

The best yet is if someone implements USB this way you could stick a memory card in to the xbox and backup to that

Creating the Xenium gamesave
Which could also be used to flash the chip add bioses etc
Reading discs and FTPing can cause problems especially for people who arn't all that good with computers but a save copied to a memory card that makes easy sence

[warbeast]

that would only work if your xbox was working to allow you to use the hdd BUT it would be a nice feature for every day updates!  

i'm just on about recovery because thats the only reason i want a new modchip to be more safe. i flashed my xbit with x2_4981 and my eeprom inside so it can boot with a blank onboard eeprom and allow me to use configmagic to recover if i ever need to.

you could boot the XOS even with a blank eeprom fine because its  based on cromwell, then flash a bios with your eeprom inside if for some reason you cant recover the eeprom from the modchip then your beable to unlock the hdd and load configmagic from the hdd to recover

sorry about the txt need sleep 4am