Hey , i recently soft modded my xbox, it was easy as hell. i dint use AR cause i wouldnt waste money on that. i d/l all the files and burnt them to disk. the mod was very easy, and to save you newbies alot of time and effort , just leave your email and ill email you all the files you need to burn to a disc. First off i dont take credit for this tutorial, but i did simplify it for all you newbies.ok what you need to do is open up your xbox. make sure its close to your PC. put the disc with the files ill send you in. Turn off your pc (keeping the cd in your cdrom drive as this will be the boot disc) now the tricky part. once your pc is shut off, unhook the IDE cable from your pc's harddrive, and the power supply(4 pin plugin) keep the IDE cable close to your xbox . now your xbox should be open(you need a 20 torx screwdriver but i was lazy so i used an allen key) unhook the power cable from your xbox, and pull out the IDE cable just a lil(keep it loose so you can unplug it really quickly). hook your pc's power cable up to your xbox hardrive(the power cable you unplugged from the computers HARDDRIVE). make sure your your xbox is hooked up to a tv. K now turn on your pc. 3 seconds after turn on your xbox.(now its time to hot swapp the drives) your xbox should boot up to the original screen. as soon as the microsoft logo appears, unplug the IDE cable from your xbox and quickly plug in the IDE cable you took out from your computer. this will then unlock the xbox hard drive, enabling you to have access to it. now a screen should pop up saying XBOX HARD DRIVE MAKER. type 1 and press enter. a new screen should come up with a penguin(linux) at the top and a bunch of files loading down, wait for them to be done. Now a new screen should pop up allowing you to type an option, just type in "softmod" all one word lower case. it should bring up a whole new screen(if you unlocked the hard drive successfully, if not it will say "xbox partition cannot be found" dont panic, this only means you didnt unlock the hard drive succesfully, just retry the hotswapping again) so ya if all went well it should bringup a whole new screen saying a bunch of crap. type 2 and press enter. it should bring you toa screen saying " 1 of 5 completed" its now installing your mod. after it gets to 5 , itll say some stupid crap like " done, quit" or something ignore it just shut offyour xbox, and pc. hook the IDE cable from your xbox back up to your xbox hard drive, and the power supply back in, n put your pc back together.
once you boot your xbox up, it will now load a whole new dashboard (evoX). there you go, you did it. it took me 1 hour to do this, and it was all free, now im able to save pictures, any sort of media files (.AVI, mpeg) and play snes, 64 and stuff. im gunna write another tutorial on how to get XBMC(xbox media center) on your xbox using FTP(file transfer protocol). happy modding=).
