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[NerdENerd]

Since my first install of a soft mod last year I have always believed that you people who get caught in clock loops have done something wrong. Now I know what it is. I had tested Xboxes 1.0 to 1.4 with leaving them unplugged for days and never had a clock loop.
I have had a C drive image with a pre Xbox live dash, an XFT hex edited dash and big fonts 25 that I have been using to mod my friends Xboxes since last year.  Every time someone wants me to soft mod their Xbox I just use MechAssualt to boot EvoX and replace their C drive with this image. I have never had a problem with this and had tested the clock loop so many time that I always guaranteed my friends, sure man you will be running Xbox Media Center with no problems after this, leaving your Xbox unplugged is no problem. I had tested this so many times with all versions of Xboxes that I knew that people who got clock loops had done something wrong.
My brother rang me up the other day and informed me of my first Xbox  clock loop. He didn’t know what was wrong with his Xbox, but after describing the symptoms I knew straight away that it was a clock loop. After months of being cocky about how bullet proof my clock soft mod image was I got very worried about my other friends that might get the same problem.
After many hours of frustration in getting a hotswap to work, getting the right DLLs, timing the cable swap etc. I renamed bert.xtf to berf.xtf.old and ernie.xtf to ernie.xtf.old put the Xbox back together and was amazed that it was still looping because how could the hack be affecting it when the fonts have been renamed.
It suddenly hit me why all these people have been getting clock loops that they can’t get out of.
You do not have Xbox.xtf and Xbox Book.xtf and this is what is causing the Xbox to crash and reboot not the hack. Some soft mod tuts out there tell you to delete these fonts and some tell you to rename them to xft. I had tested big fonts 25 so well with every version of an Xbox 1.0 to 1.3 that I knew the never looped permanently that I was safe to mod other peoples boxes. Breaking my own stuff and then having to fix it has never worried me, but I never wanted to break someone else’s stuff.
A few months ago I changed my C drive image that I use to soft mod Xboxes with to upgrade Phoenix, but in the process I deleted Xbox.xtf and Xbox Book.xtf as I though that I would never need them but I didn’t think about if I loose the clocks time.
Big fonts 25 have never failed for me in setting the time to 4th of July when the clock is dead, but when there is no Xbox.xtf or Xbox Book.xtf the Xbox loops for a completely different reason.

P.S.
If you are in a clock loop that needs a hotswap hours of frustration can be avoided by following these simple steps.

1. Plug a power cable from your PC into the Xbox hard drive.
2. Unplug your Xbox DVD drive from the IDE cable.
3. Power up the PC and press Pause/Break before the PC detects your hard drives.
4. Power up the Xbox.
5. When the Xbox LED is flashing RED-GREEN then you know the hard drive is unlocked.
6. Unplug the IDE cable from the Xbox hard drive and plug it into your PC.
7. Press enter to then detect the hard drives on your PC.

Now you have an unlocked hard drive attached to your PC.

[digisatman]

QUOTE (NerdENerd @ May 17 2004, 03:36 PM)

Since my first install of a soft mod last year I have always believed that you people who get caught in clock loops have done something wrong. Now I know what it is. I had tested Xboxes 1.0 to 1.4 with leaving them unplugged for days and never had a clock loop. I have had a C drive image with a pre Xbox live dash, an XFT hex edited dash and big fonts 25 that I have been using to mod my friends Xboxes since last year.  Every time someone wants me to soft mod their Xbox I just use MechAssualt to boot EvoX and replace their C drive with this image. I have never had a problem with this and had tested the clock loop so many time that I always guaranteed my friends, sure man you will be running Xbox Media Center with no problems after this, leaving your Xbox unplugged is no problem. I had tested this so many times with all versions of Xboxes that I knew that people who got clock loops had done something wrong. My brother rang me up the other day and informed me of my first Xbox  clock loop. He didn’t know what was wrong with his Xbox, but after describing the symptoms I knew straight away that it was a clock loop. After months of being cocky about how bullet proof my clock soft mod image was I got very worried about my other friends that might get the same problem. After many hours of frustration in getting a hotswap to work, getting the right DLLs, timing the cable swap etc. I renamed bert.xtf to berf.xtf.old and ernie.xtf to ernie.xtf.old put the Xbox back together and was amazed that it was still looping because how could the hack be affecting it when the fonts have been renamed. It suddenly hit me why all these people have been getting clock loops that they can’t get out of. You do not have Xbox.xtf and Xbox Book.xtf and this is what is causing the Xbox to crash and reboot not the hack. Some soft mod tuts out there tell you to delete these fonts and some tell you to rename them to xft. I had tested big fonts 25 so well with every version of an Xbox 1.0 to 1.3 that I knew the never looped permanently that I was safe to mod other peoples boxes. Breaking my own stuff and then having to fix it has never worried me, but I never wanted to break someone else’s stuff. A few months ago I changed my C drive image that I use to soft mod Xboxes with to upgrade Phoenix, but in the process I deleted Xbox.xtf and Xbox Book.xtf as I though that I would never need them but I didn’t think about if I loose the clocks time. Big fonts 25 have never failed for me in setting the time to 4th of July when the clock is dead, but when there is no Xbox.xtf or Xbox Book.xtf the Xbox loops for a completely different reason. P.S. If you are in a clock loop that needs a hotswap hours of frustration can be avoided by following these simple steps. 1. Plug a power cable from your PC into the Xbox hard drive. 2. Unplug your Xbox DVD drive from the IDE cable. 3. Power up the PC and press Pause/Break before the PC detects your hard drives. 4. Power up the Xbox. 5. When the Xbox LED is flashing RED-GREEN then you know the hard drive is unlocked. 6. Unplug the IDE cable from the Xbox hard drive and plug it into your PC. 7. Press enter to then detect the hard drives on your PC. Now you have an unlocked hard drive attached to your PC.

so basically you are saynig your xbox never can go/never as gone in a clock loop coz u kep the xbox book.xtf and the other file and you got bigfonts?

if so, share you image  

regards

[ldots]

Another believer
Not having the *.xtf is only an issue when you remove/rename bert & ernie. Bigfonts do not need the original fonts (unlike the Mech fonts), so the *.xtf not being there is not related to the clock loop.
Sure when Bert and Ernie are not used you need a set of the original fonts.
If you use a live-enabled dash (like 4920) these can be in the c:\fonts folder or in the root of c:\. If you wanted to not have to rename fonts in the C:\fonts folder you could just put a set of *.xtf fonts in C:\ and only have Bert and Ernie in C:\fonts

[digisatman]

QUOTE (ldots @ May 17 2004, 04:26 PM)

Another believer Not having the *.xtf is only an issue when you remove/rename bert & ernie. Bigfonts do not need the original fonts (unlike the Mech fonts), so the *.xtf not being there is not related to the clock loop. Sure when Bert and Ernie are not used you need a set of the original fonts. If you use a live-enabled dash (like 4920) these can be in the c:\fonts folder or in the root of c:\. If you wanted to not have to rename fonts in the C:\fonts folder you could just put a set of *.xtf fonts in C:\ and only have Bert and Ernie in C:\fonts

come on idots,

if he's telling the truth then mabye hes doing sumthing right??

I doubt it, but hey,

:rolleyes:  

[ldots]

Sure he is telling the truth - I'm not flaming anybody :rolleyes:, just trying to explain the events. But what he saw when renaming/removing Bert & Ernie was not a clock loop. That was the dashboard crashing and therefore rebooting because no xtf files was found (The dash loads the fonts by extension, not name).
When Bert and Ernie are present with the xtf extension the original fonts are never touched/loaded - clock loop or not.

[NerdENerd]

My original post was quite bad, it was 2am and I was quite drunk. I will sum up what could have been said in a few sentances.

I believe that most people who are stuck in a permanent clock will be due to the fact that when they installed the font hack they also removed the Xbox.xtf and Xbox Book.xtf font files. This may be due to either deleting them or renaming them to xft. A few tutes out there I have seen tell you to either delete the fonts and some tell you to rename them to xft for a hex edited dash.

If these fonts are missing the Xbox crashes when it tries to go to the clock set screen. I could not get out of this loop and it was not due to the hack but due to the fact the original fonts were missing.

If you have a font hacked box make sure that you leave a copy of the original fonts in there as well as bert and ernie. If you have a hex edited xft dash as well then make a copy of the fonts and rename the copies to Xbox.xft and Xbox Book.xft.

Now I have added the original fonts back to my C drive image with updated Phoenix I have retested it and after loosing the clock big fonts 25 are now setting the clock at 4th of July. I have tried this with both an Xbox 1.0 and a 1.4.

[NerdENerd]

QUOTE (ldots @ May 17 2004, 04:43 PM)

When Bert and Ernie are present with the xtf extension the original fonts are never touched/loaded - clock loop or not.

Not true,
When an XBE make a reference to a font the OS will call the font loading routine that will parse all files with an xtf extension. If bert and ernie are present then they will cause some of the OS to be over written by a buffer overflow with an exception loop that triggers the hack.
Now if the OS has not tried to run any code that is over written with the exception loop yet and tries to load the font Xbox.xtf or Xbox Book.xtf and it is not in memory then this will cause a crash. But if the Xbox.xtf or Xbox Book.xtf is there the OS font loading routine can keep doing its thing until it hits the exception loop which then runs the hack and sets the time.
The fact that Xbox.xtf or Xbox Book.xtf is missing then the Xbox OS is crashing before the exception loop is hit and therefor the hack never triggered to set the clock to the 4th of July.

[jon20usa]

hey. idk. if i was u i would edit my original post to something that makes sense. i dont know wut ur first post was talking about and if might confuse some noobs. im not trying to flame i just dont want peepz posting new topics saying they saw ur thread and that they know how to stop the clock loop problem. there is no solution to the clock loop. if u use any kind of font exploit u have the possibility of running into a clock loop. and not to be mean but i think ldots knows a little more about these things than all of us so just try to watch wut u post. (not a flame)    

[chimpanzee]

Then how can the hacked font be triggered ? Was it triggered by the font loading mechanism or the font using mechanism ? If it is the former, I can see you point but if it is the later, would it mean that it may not be tried at all ?

[ldots]

QUOTE (NerdENerd @ May 18 2004, 02:08 AM)

Not true, When an XBE make a reference to a font the OS will call the font loading routine that will parse all files with an xtf extension. If bert and ernie are present then they will cause some of the OS to be over written by a buffer overflow with an exception loop that triggers the hack. Now if the OS has not tried to run any code that is over written with the exception loop yet and tries to load the font Xbox.xtf or Xbox Book.xtf and it is not in memory then this will cause a crash. But if the Xbox.xtf or Xbox Book.xtf is there the OS font loading routine can keep doing its thing until it hits the exception loop which then runs the hack and sets the time. The fact that Xbox.xtf or Xbox Book.xtf is missing then the Xbox OS is crashing before the exception loop is hit and therefor the hack never triggered to set the clock to the 4th of July.

Yes true!
As I said the xboxdash never loads fonts by their name - only the extension (*.xtf). The actual name of the font is in the font header (Xbox and XBox Book). So the OS never tries to load Xbox.xtf and XBox Book.xtf, it looks for xtf files. That goes for the clock setting code of the xboxdash as well, and is the reason the Mech fonts so brilliantly tries to patch the xboxdash in memory to look for *.bak fonts in stead of *.xtf fonts (which is bert and ernie). Reloading Bert and Ernie in the clock setting code causes a crash/reboot.
And where would you put these original fonts? If you put them in C:\fonts the hack does not work - at least not on my xbox. If you rename the extension they are never seen by the unedited xboxdash.

[anu|b|iss]

are you using the bigfonts 25?
cuz that's what he's using and is saying it works with them there.

[ldots]

Just tried with bigfonts 25 to be sure . When both Bert&Ernie and the orginal fonts are present with the *.xtf extension the hack doesn't tricker, but instead the dashboard loads normally. You have to rename the extension of the origianal fonts (as expected), but then there is no chance these will ever load...

[xxwillisxx]

i never get the clock loop and i got fonts in C and in the fonts folder

the fonts on C are .xtf
and there size is xbox book.xtf is    13.77mb
                       xbox.xtf is            14.89mb

the 2 in the fonts folder are

                        xbox book.xft        13.77mb
                        xbox.xft               18.24mb

[ldots]

Good for you Some people never see the loop.
But the fact that you dont get a clock loop is not related to you having the original fonts in C:\fonts or C:. They are renamed, therefore not seen by xboxdash.
As said before elsewhere the success of the hacked fonts rely on a bunch of "uncontrolable" factors. Take your exact setup to another xbox and that might loop...

[xxwillisxx]

there not renamed in C: gest in font folder