You will not be able to flash the tsop, untill you can get the box to boot up normally. So without a hardrive in there(locked to the mobo)...thats a no-go. Basically you will have to chip it to replace the harddrive. Rebuild the hardrive, lock it, transfer gamesave exploits onto hdd, remove modchip, solder write enable points on mobo, load up exploited game, flash tsop. Seems like a big hassle when you could just install a cheap duox2 lite and leave it in there....
You have a few options but they all involve temporarily(or permanently) installing a modchip. ( unless you happen to have the hdd lock key backed up somehow)
