I recently came across a 360 with a bad DVD drive and purchased it for a fun summer project.
I am planning to replace the bad Hitachi drive (gives disc unplayable error) with a Toshiba-Samsung. I'll replace the drive via these instructions and check to see if it works.
After confirming drive works with my 360, I will then flash Toshiba-Samsung drive with the latest custom firmware (via instructions I downloaded somewhere).
Sounds like a plan, right? Is there anything else I'm missing or anything I should do first before commencing operation?
Well....I got one question for you. Do you have your key? Make sure you have your original backed up firmware. Wait a minute is the Hitachi modded?
If it is/isn't you will need to get the key off of the Hitachi drive then you will be able use it in your xbox360. In case you didn't know you just can't swap dvd drives without any keys. Hope this helps
I finally got the 360 opened and used MemDump to dump the keys. However, according to a walk through, I should be getting hex bytes. All I'm getting is gibberish.
The 360 drive is indeed, defective. So I'm guessing for this operation to be successful, I need to have a working 360 drive? Is the only other way to get it working is to buy another Hitachi drive and swap boards?
Try to see if you can dump it again.I read once that there is way to get it off of the motherboard but it requires advanced skill. And I don't know how. The other hitachi will not work...you need the original. I don't understand what you mean by swapping boards. Would that be swapping the dvd drive motherboard with another dvd drive motherboard? Maybe one of the senior members could answer this question best.
Ah ... I remember reading that you could simply swap internal board for between the same DVD drive.
In my case, the Hitachi drive is simply bad ( I can hear some sort of grinding noise when placing a DVD in).
Could this be the reason why the DVD drive is not dumping the keys correctly? If worse comes to worse, I'll just simply buy another hitachi and swap boards (if possible).