Need Help Re-softmodding My Xbox, And everything is fuzzy and black & white? Options

[Thuggalo420DL]

It used to be modded years ago I'm not sure why or what happened (it's been so long) but now it's running the original MS dash and it won't recognize any games. It'll attempt to load up 007 Nightfire but won't go past the loading screen. Disc drive is probably on the fritz, it's been moved around between the underside of beds and basements for a long time. I'd like to get it running again so I can back up all my old games on it since it won't read any of them. I already have an 80 gig drive in it so that won't be a problem. Basically my biggest problem right now is how do I mod the darn thing? And what's with the colors? I suspect it has something to do with being in PAL mode but I'm no expect (should be NTSC.) If I just use the standard yellow video cable its fuzzy and colorless, if I use the HD RGB plugs my TV gives me an Invalid Signal error. Any help would be GREATLY appreciated.

http://img714.imageshack.us/img714/8247/im...01202071336.jpg

Hopefully that's clear enough.

I'm almost positive I still have the HDkey and EEPROM, is there any way I could pop it in my computer and get it running that way?

This post has been edited by Thuggalo420DL: Feb 7 2012, 09:01 PM

[Thuggalo420DL]

Can I just put the Xbox hard drive in my PC, unlock it, put the required saved game files on, relock it and throw it back in my Xbox?

[Movax]

Can I just put the Xbox hard drive in my PC, unlock it, put the required saved game files on, relock it and throw it back in my Xbox?

Disc drive is probably on the fritz,

Depends if your drive will read the game for the gamesave to load. You can try unlocking and using xboxhdm/xplorer360. (Make sure your eeprom backup is valid if you do this).

If you can access FTP you might be able to extract Hexen (google it) and FTP it to your xbox hdd and run it from there and fix up your softmod. Not sure if it runs properly from hdd, but I imagine it should.

You should verify if you do in fact have a softmod..it sounds like that is what you are implying.

This post has been edited by Movax: Feb 7 2012, 10:57 PM

[Thuggalo420DL]

No, sorry. As of right now it's back to the old regular MS dashboard, no softmod. I had to use the hard drive for something else and when I put it back in I just stuck the default dash back on it instead of softmodding again. I think I'm going to see what I can do with xboxhdm,

[Movax]

Use xboxhdm with ndure installer with your eeprom.bin if you have it. Otherwise hotswap.

[Thuggalo420DL]

Got it working, somehow. For hours every time I thought I'd gotten it working it would boot to the Xbox Live "Create an account" page and I couldn't get out of it.. eventually I just formatted the drive with xboxhdm, hit rebuild C and when I stuck it back in my Xbox Evox was there to greet me. I don't know how it happened but it did. Thanks for the help.

[Thuggalo420DL]

Alright, still confused. I have Evox on here now.... but when I try to see what's actually on my xbox there's nothing. FTP into it. C is empty, D is empty, E has Cache, TDATA and UDATA and F is empty. X Y and Z of course have some junk in them from some games I was testing but nothing relevant. Where the hell is Evox hiding and how can I replace it as my default dashboard?

Oh nevermind I got it.. Last time I softmodded (5+ years ago?) the default dash went into C: and moved the msdash elsewhere. Don't know why I expected this to be the same. I'm still curious as to where evox is hiding though. Sneaky bastard.

This post has been edited by Thuggalo420DL: Feb 8 2012, 10:04 PM

[Heimdall]

Boot with HeXEn (Google Heimdall's Xbox Engineering Disc), burned to DVD-R at 4x or slower. It will give you FTP access via UnleashX running on a known BIOS, so you will be able to see what's on your Xbox. You might also want to use it to replace your softmod with a known, stable one. It will also allow you to switch dashboards easily.

This post has been edited by Heimdall: Feb 8 2012, 09:57 PM

[Thuggalo420DL]

Is ndure considered unstable? I put UnleashX in E:\Dashboard and it loads up by default now. Seems like the only problem I have now is with my colors. Somehow my xbox got stuck on PAL so I think that may be the culprit.

[Heimdall]

Kingroach NDURE 3.1 is very stable ...... but if you can't find anything on your E partition then I'm not sure what you have done, so I'm suggesting that a clean reinstall will get you back to a known, good state.

Actually, I think I've just figured out what you did. Does your Evox menu only have a few options?

- Boot game from DVD
- Settings
- Reboot Xbox
- Power off

If so then you used the wrong options when you built xboxhdm, or when you ran it and the ndure script, and consequently you ended up with no dash files on the E partition, and you're booting the rescue dash from the real C. If that's the case then reinstalling with HeXEn will fix it for you. Alternatively you could use xboxhdm again, but this time follow one of the links in my signature - either softmod with hotswap, or softmod with eeprom if you have the eeprom.

This post has been edited by Heimdall: Feb 8 2012, 11:42 PM

[Thuggalo420DL]

Yeah, ndure gave me a lot of errors. It kept saying "too many open files" and presumably skipped over them. Most looked like sound files but they went by too fast. At any rate I've fixed my problems. I used Enigmas video switcher to get my once-NTSC box back to NTSC again and I don't see any problems at the moment. I'm going to keep this HeXen disc handy just to be safe but for now I think I'm good. Thank you very much for the help! I'm glad to see the community is still alive after all this time.


EDIT: Unless of course you think that just running it as-is might be problematic in the future, I just don't want to try out this HeXen disc now when there doesn't seem to be any problems on the surface.

This post has been edited by Thuggalo420DL: Feb 9 2012, 04:26 AM

[AZImmortal]

You should definitely use Hexen to reinstall your softmod. The way things are now, you're exposing your actual C: drive contents to being overwritten, which could disable your softmod or (even worse) leave you with a non-functioning Xbox. Reinstalling ndure will protect your C: drive contents by utilizing a fake C: drive (aka: shadow C).

[Heimdall]

Do you now have Evox as your dash, or UnleashX? If your dash is still Evox with only four items on the menu then your softmod is still incomplete - and that's what I'd expect, since switching from PAL to NTSC shouldn't magically make the contents of the E partition reappear.

[Thuggalo420DL]

I just threw UX under E:/Dashboard, I'm not using Evox any more. I still had to manually create the apps/games/dashboard folders though. I'll throw Hexen in and see what it does, what's the worst that could happen.

[Thuggalo420DL]

You should definitely use Hexen to reinstall your softmod. The way things are now, you're exposing your actual C: drive contents to being overwritten, which could disable your softmod or (even worse) leave you with a non-functioning Xbox. Reinstalling ndure will protect your C: drive contents by utilizing a fake C: drive (aka: shadow C).

I don't appear to actually have a C drive at all unless the files are hidden; it's blank.

EDIT: Yeah apparently they're hidden, HeXen showed me a lot more than I could see before when I FTP'd to the box while using UnleashX.

This post has been edited by Thuggalo420DL: Feb 9 2012, 02:42 PM