Hello, last week I finally bought my first Xbox 360…for my kids. I bought it used; the warranty expired earlier this year. The unit seems to work fine, except for some trouble ejecting the tray… as more than half of the time we need to push on the tray after pressing the eject button, or it won’t open. Before deciding on a 360 over a PS3 or a Wii, I did some research on how realistic it would be to backup games and possibly use some copied games…for regular playing as well as playing on Live. After discovering that the unit I was about to buy had the Samsung drive (not sure if it’s an MS25 or MS28 as I haven’t opened the unit yet) I decided to take the plunge and go for it. I’m still new to the concept of flashing the firmware, but I’ve watched quite a few videos and read up on the process which I think I’ll be able to do without too much trouble. However I’m still a bit hazy on some basic issues of using hacked firmware and copied games on Xbox Live and I’d really appreciate some answers to the following questions if you can help me, please. Thank you!

1. What is the best firmware to use with the Samsung drives? Where should I check for updated firmware releases so that I can stay current?
2. Is there a difference between Stealth firmware and iXtreme firmware?—and other firmware releases?—which one should I focus on?
3. Have Microsoft’s latest Xbox 360 updates caught or banned the most recent hacked firmwares?—is it still safe to login to Live with a hacked firmware?—how can you know when to revert back to the original firmware to avoid a ban?
4. I understand that apart from having a hacked firmware, the game copies themselves also need to be “Stealthed” in order to go undetected by Microsoft on Live? How do you check a game to see if it Stealthed and safe to play on Live?—by using “Xbox Backup Creator”?
5. Xmod 360 Samsung Dual Firmware Mod: Is this another firmware to consider? Not sure how old this is, but from what I understand it allows you to have the original firmware inside the flashrom of the drive and still use the hacked firmware?
6. I have an MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum motherboard…it uses the nForce3 SATA chipset…will that work with both the MS25 and MS28 Samsung drives?

Thank you so much for taking your time to help answer these questions!
Nathan

Hi

Rather than answer all these questions in any level of detail, I strongly advise you read through the pinned tutorials, including the FAQs and the releases, tutorials and guides as no doubt there will be more questions to follow!

OK, what are the "pinned tutorials"?

Thanks

Some forums call them Stickys, here they're called Pinned. The first page of each forum has important/popular topics "pinned" at the top of the page, so they're easy to find.

Thank you...reading the "pinned" posts now.

Regards