There are two easy answers and one hard/stupid answer:
Easy 1 - Just stick to using the chip.
Easy 2 - Buy a 29-Wire Modchip
And the hard answer is what recently happened to me...
I bought a broken Xbox off ebay recently which said it had problems powering on. Turns out, it was a 1.4/1.5 Coma Console with the Focus vid encoder. So I'm like great...I have to buy a chip to fix it. It just couldn't be easy could it? I have my mouse cursor over the checkout button and I decide to make it my "challenge" to fix this Xbox without a chip. I look back at the ebay description and it says that very, very rarely the Xbox will boot up, and if it does, it will stay on for a long time. So I tried for a half-hour, probably over 100 bootups and restarts. No go. So I go to the forums and search around for people with 1.2+ comas. One guy says his Xbox will only boot up if it's cold. I figure it's worth a shot. I throw the Xbox in the freezer for a half hour and get my TSOP saves on the memory card. What do you know, it boots up! So I throw the saves on there and toss in my exploitable game. Crap, my rooms too warm...the Xbox "froze" because it wasn't "frozen" anymore. Back in the freezer. Get it back out, it boots up, and I try to flash it. Fails to flash in Raincoat, stupid Winbond TSOP. I realize I'm using a rather old Raincoat (.5) so I get an updated TSOP flasher save. Xbox goes back in the freezer. It comes back out, I boot it up, delete the old saves, copy over the new ones just in time before the Xbox dies again. Back in the freezer...again. Get it back out, throw in my game, and Hey! It flashes the TSOP! So I try powering it back on, it boots up. I wait 5 minutes until it gets warm. Turn it off. It's fully thawed, so if it boots up this time, I know I fixed it. Tadaa! I take the lid off the Xbox and I see an Electronic Nightmare waiting to happen. Everything is covered in water from the freezing/melting/condensation. There are even small puddles on the motherboard. When I held the motherboard at an angle, it dripped off the corner. I was lucky. Since it wasn't tap water, it didn't have the chemicals and minerals that make water conductive. My Xbox was covered in non-conductive water, so it wasn't a big deal after all.
You already have access to the hard drive via the Chip. Make sure you write enable the points to begin with. If you get the soldering fine, and the saves are perfect, then you would only have to freeze your Xbox one time to get it to boot up without a chip. It's up to you, I'm just telling you my story of how I saved a 1.4/1.5 coma without a chip.
P.S. - Even when frozen, the Xbox did not like being booted using the power button (not sure why). Use the eject button to turn the Xbox on if you try this.
