First post on 360 stuff so please be gentle! Not an entire NOOB, nor am I a low level genius in the subject either so please if you can pitch responses somewhere between there.
I got a 360 from a friend to help fix as it stopped recognizing his games (would only play DVD's Audio CD's). I replaced the lens in the console (it has a BENQ drive) and it still does the exact same thing, so I'm thinking it's a problem with the drive.
I've been able to extract the original key and flash the drive with iExtreme 1.6 using the latest version of Iprep. After flashing it, the drive is still seen by the console and will open/close/play DVD's etc. fine, but the problem is still the same (to play this disc, put it into an XBOX 360 console).
I then planned to use the Benq hacked firmware and simply flash it to a MS28 I bought off ebay, but I can't get Iprep to see it. I'm using a 360 connectivity kit to power the new drive (worked fine when I was flashing the benq) but when I attach it to the MS28 nothing happens. The drive doesn't eject and iprep just skips through the SATA ports as if it's not there.
I've seen something similar when I accidentally bricked a liteon drive a while back accidentally and it has no bios on it so couldn't do anything. I'm assuming this is because the MS28 is a brand new virgin/stock drive and has no firmware on it. I've got 2x MS28's and they both do the same thing, both of them were brand new, so I don't think they're fauly.
I've been looking all over the web for a solution to this problem, and have seen things about bios shield type thingy for the MS28s which you have to disable before you can flash them.
Does anyone know if:
1. Can I use iprep to flash a brand new stock/virgin MS28 drive?
2. If I had a virgin/stock replacement Benq drive, would it have the same problem (i.e. no bios).
Before anyone asks, I'd prefer to use Iprep, I have an old Compaq PC with a SATA card in it and it flies through the flashing with Benq drives and has worked 1st time every time without fail. Using jungleflasher etc on my other PC has caused me no end of ballache (see comment on bricked lite-on above).
Would happily spring for a new Benq drive if I can just swap like for like and iprep will see it. But don't want the stress of getting it to see that it won't power up/open etc if it's brand new and I can't use it.
I believe you might be able to recover the Samsung using DosFlash v1.7 (I'm betting that is what iPrep uses). I think when the Samsung is first powered on with no firmware, you can only get status 0x70 for about 1 or 2 seconds after it is powered on. So get DosFlash going and right before you start DosFlash, shut the drive off. As soon as you power on the drive hit enter on the dosflash command and see if it will pick it up.
