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I installed a SmartXX V3 in my 1.0 Xbox a few years ago and I mainly use it for XBMC. It has always worked great and hasn't required much maintenance at all, but recently I started getting flashing ring lights on startup. A few restarts would usually fix the issue and it would boot normally, but now when pressing power it starts up 3 times and then FRAGs. The small blue status LED on the SmartXX itself never turns on. If I remove the SmartXX, the 3 blue LEDS on the Xapt3r come on as expected, and the single red LED (for D0) flashes once or twice, and the original Xbox bios loads normally. I've looked at the motherboard, Xapt3r and SmartXX and everything looks fine, with no solder splatter where the Xapt3r pins touch the motherboard.

I've searched for a solution to this and it seems like these solderless solutions are often unreliable, so I'm thinking it's a problem with the Xapt3r even though I've reseated it quite a few times. Is it possible that the Xapt3r or it's installation (I didn't use furrows in the mobo holes by the way) is bad even though the LEDs all come on as expected without the SmartXX? I also have the option of doing a soldered install using the pin header that came with the SmartXX, but I don't want to go through the trouble if it's easy to fix the Xapt3r install or likely that the SmartXX is dead.

Thanks in advance!