The X-Chip is flashed with the 1.6 Evox BIOS. I can read and write to the X-Chip OK, make a change and read that the change has happened.

That usually means that the X-Chip is OK.

I had originally used a solderless install and was having fragging and so spoke to Easybuy who said that I should solder it in. The guy there said that the solderless method had too many places where a problem could occur.

Well it's soldered in now. I've checked the solder joints and buzzed everything out with a voltmeter and continuity checker and it all looks good. I can see that I have connection from the solder joints through to the top of the pin header.

If I remove the X-Chip from the pin header then the X-Box boots as normal and so I know that the D0 connection is definitely good and that the motherboard hasn't blown or anything horrible.

Any idea on what to try and/or test?

I'm planning on calling Easybuy in the morning for an RMA as the only thing I can think of is that the X-Chip itself, even though it will flash and read back is dead .... bad connection in the pin header connection(?). Note that I tried the nickel trick to no avail.

Cheers a very frustrated me after re-checking everything three times.

And wow are those pins small to solder to .... I had to use my kid's mini magnifying glass to be able to see them. And I mean really mini magnifying glass out of his spy kit.

Duncan

Yea I had what i'm pretty sure is the exact same problem. When it frags, it doesn the on, off, on, off, on (red and green) thing right?

Try this. If you disconnect the +5v from the chip, with all of the other solder points still intact, does the xbox still boot normally from the original bios? If so, then your problem is not your soldering (or at least you havent shorted any connections).

Then we move on to the next part. I remember trying to reflash the damn thing to original factory conditions just to see if it would boot, but it was then that it would frag. The problem wast this, don't use the original full.bin raw bios file to reflash the thing. That's only for versions 1.0-1.5. Took me forever to figure that out, and I thought my chip was a gonner for sure.

Look around for a raw bios file named full16.bin, and reflash the entire chip with that. Then try booting it up, and if the on, off, on, off, on thing goes away (even if it still fails to boot) then u know it was a bios problem. Then you can go ahead and load evox m8 or x2 5035.

Hope this helped.