I have been troubling myself for the last two weeks to be able to make backups of my original xbox360 disks and i can say for sure that the pionner 111d drive and the Vebratim disks is the way to go.I tried everything on my previous drive the nec 3540a along a couple of brands of dvds(including Vebratim) and nothing worked.So people if you want success you should buy the pionner drive and rest easy.My XBOX360 dvd drive is the HITACHI 46d hacked with 1.1 version of the released firmware from Commodore4eva.

yea bought verb disks and same burner burned at 2-2.4x and they play just like originals. well all ive burned is fight night so far but it loads like my original does.

I used my nec with no luck,

Picked up the pioneer 111d and verbatim and work great at 8x burns ev

How do they run at X8? Any tricks required?

I burned mine at 6X and they require me to cold-boot them.

Burns at 2.4x on verbs from a pio 110 work perfectly in my 46DH.

i burn at 4x. the slowest speed a pioneer will burn is 2.4x based on watching the thing burn. if you ask for 1x it still burns at like 3200k/sec .

Besides who wants to wait 35+ mins for a coaster or game

I wonder what makes this pioneer so compatable with 360 drives.

From what I can tell the quality of the pioneer burns is just superior. I have been reading up on this due to the quality of burns coming our of my Benq 1655 (and although rated well, I think mine is fried). I went with the Pioneer. It will be here this afternoon. I will post a follow up. So far I have not been able to get anything to boot, cold or otherwise.

my pioneer is fantastic. cheap too.

verbatims are also as good as it gets. the only coaster I made was a burn I tried at 8x. It just wouldn't boot. When I burned it at 6x, it worked perfectly.

I mean I have an LG and it makes perfect backups for the Samsung but many have said it's a no go for the Hitachi.

you guys ever wonder if the pio is just brand new and compared to that tired dvd burner we've been using for the last six months it might be the fact that its new. I pulled an old Lite-on SOHW-1693s(never burnt anything on it) that was too noisy for my tasting on bootup, out of the dust and it works just as well as the PIO 111D with my hitachi and verbatim.

new laser
write strategy for verbatim

probably has alot to do with it. Assuming all other drives are brand new and can book type??

its not fair to compare a drive thats backed up 100's of dvd's/cd's (personal backups) to something brand new out of the box.

Good point, I was thinking the same thing.

Yeah , at 8x they are needing the trick, moving back to 2.4x......

Oh yeah just to explain how i made a nec a pioneer,

1. Bestbuy 80$ (the 80$ they have is a pio 111d)
2. put nec in pio box( I altered bar code on nec sticker with a pen but it does not have any Nec branding whatsoever.
3. Bring box back to bestbuy.

SHHHH!

Thats a neat trick, anyways, what's the media code on your verbatim discs? Cause I think you have to have a certain media code in order to successful burn at 8x just as good as 2.4x. I think you need MKM 003

Add me to the list. I popped in the first verb disc on my Pioneer 111D, burned the image from my backup and bingo. Loads like an original everytime.

Pioneer 111D with firmware 1.23RPC1 dangerous brothers, CloneCD, and Verbatim DVD+R DL @ 2.4X

Nice,

111d with 1.23 firmware has burned 5 working backups.

verbatim from samclub $60 for 30... decent deal.

I have an XBox 360 w/Hitachi 59DJ drive.

Just today I got my Pioneer 111D drive and guess what, the discs actually boot now, (NEC sucks for Xbox!)

My specs:

Hitachi 59DJ
Pioneer 111d w/1.23 Firmware
Verbatim burned at 4x

Only thing is I have to do the soft mod or put them in the drive, power down for about 15 sec, then power up to get them to work.

Same exact thing here, I wonder why some people get this setup to make their backups work like originals and we are stuck doing stupid tricks. I don't know what to try to fix it...

Well what I was thinking was maybe in the firmware for our DVD drive the xbox specifies how many seconds to scan for the SS before timing out. And maybe if someone released a tweak to the firmware to flash that allows says, an extra 5 seconds or something, that it might solve the problem. But I'm just assuming all this so I could be wrong...

how do i flash my pioneer with the 1.23 firmware?