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[DrDeceased]

My friend and I are reading around linding all the nifty things you can do with a moded box so late last Sunday we decide to have a crack at mine.

Using the TuT, The Complete No Modchip... , we set out upon our quest.

After reading that TuT 4 times over we searched about and got our shopping list.
Finding the stuff was fairly easy, and we rejoiced!

After clammering around to find a small torx bit.  
We had our HD out and were on step 2!

We ran into a bit of difficulty here. This TuT was a bit unclear, and being n00bs to the scene as we are we had no clue...
So after researching the ' hot swap ' method, and being very weary of it, we threw our best at it.

Unfortunately after 10 tries, it still did not work.
So I sat back and drank a beer while I let my friend rip his hair out on it...
Soon enough I came up with an idea!
Being somewhat savy with computers I decided that perhaps the computer is locking the drive when it boots...  so I plugged the drive into the PC, turned it on, paused the boot screen after the HD detection, unplugged the HD, plugged it back into the boX and booted it.... Then after the dash popped up I 'hotswapped' it back and resumed the PC boot process!

B-I-N-G-O!
It worked!!

Being extremely pleased with ourselves we trucked headlong into the next steps!

Altering the file system after that was a sinch, we installed the fonts and the dash with no problems.

Now came the soldering part  <_<

Not being a stranger to my soldering iron I was confident going in.

I made the connections that the TuT linked to and was proud of my work.
So pleased in fact that I closed the boX up as my friend asked "What are you doing?" only to hear the reply "My solders are perfect!"  :lol:

Turning on the boX and racing the the flash menu.... ' Cannot write '  

So I figure, maybe, possibly, I did F up my bridges. I pull the box back open.
4
6
8
WTF!?!!
These joints are FINE!!

Well, bed time....

GOOD MORNING!
Well, lets finish this thing!!!!!

*Click*
Flash
Restart
Flash
Restart

GAH!!!! WTF DID I DO???

After a few searches, I find that the font exploit is netorious for a ' restart loop ' or ' time loop '
Well, I find some kinda half assed sounding solutions including pressing buttons and instering disks, that didnt work. Then I try the 'connect to active network idea' sure enough it works.... and Im back in.

Now durring my searches I find a nice little list of BIOS id strings along with some FLASH id strings..here.. thinking that possibly my evox.ini was clueless to my BIOS I did the right thing and updated it with my proper BIOS (I found the FTP feature of IE to be quite useful).  And BAM it works like a charm.

Of to the races I go.

Updated my BIOS twice now, switched to UnleashedX, Getting ready to install a new HD and DVD-ROM

Thanks for the help all you chatter boxes!!!


Edit: Oh, and I removed burt and ernie..... Is that cool?

This post has been edited by DrDeceased: May 14 2004, 02:41 AM

[colibri]

yeah game save exploits are way easier.. specially since you are flashing the bios neways.. cheers

[chaoscreator]

QUOTE (DrDeceased @ May 14 2004, 04:32 AM)

We ran into a bit of difficulty here. This TuT was a bit unclear, and being n00bs to the scene as we are we had no clue... So after researching the ' hot swap ' method, and being very weary of it, we threw our best at it. Unfortunately after 10 tries, it still did not work. So I sat back and drank a beer while I let my friend rip his hair out on it... Soon enough I came up with an idea! Being somewhat savy with computers I decided that perhaps the computer is locking the drive when it boots...  so I plugged the drive into the PC, turned it on, paused the boot screen after the HD detection, unplugged the HD, plugged it back into the boX and booted it.... Then after the dash popped up I 'hotswapped' it back and resumed the PC boot process! B-I-N-G-O! It worked!!

Okay, can you go into a bit more detail here?

[jtcheng]

I'm stuck in the restarting loop myself, so how exactly did you fix it?!  

[DrDeceased]

chaoscreator:
What exactally I did for the hotswap was...
-Plug the xbox drive into the PC, power and ide cable.
-Turn on the PC
-After the PC's BIOS detected the drive I paused the computer with the pause break key.
-I than removed the computers IDE cable from xbox hard drive (with computer still running and paused)
-plugged the xbox IDE into it, and turned on the xbox.
-Let it boot to the dash and unplugged the IDE
-Then I quickly plugged the PC's IDE cable back into it.
-Then broke the 'pause' by hitting enter.
-Windows (xpp) booted I ran hddriver and I was in.


   
jtcheng:
I have a small network here at my home.
I did a forum search and found a list of possible solutions to break the loop.
None of them worked except for connecting my xbox to the network.
Hope that it works for you, the only other alternative I had (seems how the other ideas in the post didnt work) was to let the xbox boot for 5+ hours  

This post has been edited by DrDeceased: May 14 2004, 04:56 AM

[DrDeceased]

I have now sucessfully 'upgraded' my friends boX.
We ran into trouble with the hot swap.
We found that swapping before the DMI pooling did not work, only directly after the DMI (and I mean DIRECTLY!) were we able to get the swap to work every time.

By every time I mean, the font exploit refused to work.
After a bit of messing with it, I wondered what dash we were trying it on.
He had just updated to the 5659 dash, and it refused to work.
Luckly I had a previous version handy, otherwise it would have been back to the 'usual places'.

Another issue we had we found, but didnt relize, was a whole lot of files with y's after them.  After a sucessfully installing the font files and dash we rebooted.  1 good boot to the dash and we continued the steps to flash the bios.  Unfortunately after flashing we saw the original M$ dash... we went back in and renamed the dash (our problem solving in the works) and rebooted again.... the evox dash would not load. On a second inspection we  noticed even more files with the y's after their extentions.  I figure the HD was failing, so I installed my old unlocked drive.

It now works fine, thanks again forums.



EDIT: Durring the process I encountered a error 21...
I was still able to hotswap the drive but only after the micro$oft popped up under the'X' and before the screen changed to the error.  I put the drive in my hand, and if it felt it lock, I knew I was 2 late.  Any time that I hotswapped sucessfully my PC would boot quickly, not the 5 min thing that it says in the tut.

MOD: feel free to move this thread to any forum that you think it is better suited to.

This post has been edited by DrDeceased: May 16 2004, 05:46 PM