I don't see how you can be so sure it's the exploit, when it's working extremely well for so many people. It took me three attempts to get NDURE working, but I finally figured it out, and it's really cool. My advice: work out what you need to do differently, because I really doubt you're the first person with a 1.0 to install NDURE.
With regards to your hard drive, that's not a great thing to happen, and you have my sympathy. I managed to perma-lock a 120gb drive when I first got into modding, due to my lack of knowledge.
You have to face facts: XBoxHDM did not tamper with anything. You made a mistake. It's that simple. Your hard drive is now a doorstop. I've been there, and it's not so great. Your X-Box, however, is far from dead. Bt installing a chip - even if only temporarily - you can get the eeprom, and use that to lock a new hard drive. If you're borrowing a solderless chip, that would be my recommendation. If you have to buy a chip, you don't need to worry about locking the hard drive at all, you can just install any new drive.
This is an expensive lesson, but take heed of this: People have been trying to help you in this thread, and you're just blaming your tools. Well, that doesn't seem too polite to me, considering that people like Krayzie and the others put a lot of work into them for our benefit.
