Here's the Deal,

My friend gave me a free Xbox 360 that he found in an rig Trailer, I thought Sweet deal! It came with no cables, but I don't mind buying those. The problem is, the DVD drive is SHOT! It makes grinding noses with out any disks in it! It has already destroyed an xbox 360 game, and I have looked inside (The seals were pre-broken) and noticed nothing wrong!. Any way, I am thinking of buying a new drive of Ebay or something like that, but the problem is, I don't know if I can flash it or not...

The drive I have in it right now is a HL and I will be buying the same drive.

Can I simply use a flashing program to Grab the old firmware and flash it to the new drive?

And if so, What program will flash it? I did a little looking and MTKFlash is said not to work.

It will cost $120 for a 20GB hard Drive, Power Brick, VGA cables, and the DVD drive (Canadian)


Is it worth it?

Or should I buy 1 GB ram for my lappy?

Yes you can recover the key from the broken drive and then flash that onto a new drive
look HERE for all the information on how to do that
paying $120 for a pro 360 console doesn't sound too bad to me

If you buy the exact same drive as a replacement, just swap the drive boards around inside the DVD. No need to retrieve key information or spoof the drive. Whatever's mechanically wrong with the drive will be eliminated by doing this and as long as the board is logically ok (which I guess it is since you can actually get into the 360 dashboard with no quirks), you should be good to go.

Thanks for the help!

I will be swaping teh DVD boards for sure! Sounds much easier then flashing, and a lot less prone to die...
And the fact that my only working computer is a PII 400Mhz with out sata... I misflashed the bios on my main rig, trashing the mother bord...

Thanks for the Quick Response!!

I don't think I'd invest in a new drive just yet, hard to tell what shape the original one was in and who knows if it even has the right key on it for that 360 since it had already been opened. If the thing works fine, minus the drive issue of course, then I'd see if ya can get a friend with the same model drive (doesn't have to be the same version) and swap over your Logic board to it and install that in the thing and make sure it'll play games, that way ya know the key is good before ya invest in a new drive and such.

If there's a problem on the actual board swapping it over isn't going to do anything but make the new drive act bad as well. A grinding noise is typically the magnet on the spindle motor come loose and stuck to the lid half of the spindle, might wanna check into seeing if that's OK, the drive in there might even be salvageable.

Sent ya a PM about yer PC issue also.

LOL!

Anyway, It makes Grinding Noses with NO DVD OR CD IN THE DRIVE!
The Laser is grinding!

Games do work! My friend played NHL 07 for around 1-2 hours before the disc was distroyed, and we both played a demo DVD (Perfect Dark) For around 5 minutes, until the grinding nosies Got to me!

I know for a fact that I will use the xbox 360 for other uses (Demos [Crackdown!!!] , MSN, Media...)
and spend my time soft moding a Xbox one I bought of the same friend for $15 (No cables, but I already fried my old xbox trying to fix the dvd drive.... Hope that doesn't happen again.. .)

Anyway, don't feel bad for my crapy computer, my laptop (2Ghz P4) WAS running fine until the hard drive craped out... If I move it, it crashes... Going to kick the old 30GB out and get a 80 GB in!!

Any way, thanks for all your help!

If it's making noises with no disc in the drive then it can still be the magnet on the spindle motor, the laser doesn't move fast enough to make any kind of noise like that and if it were responsible for the noise it most likely wouldn't work at all. Take the cover off the drive and see if the magnet is missing or stuck to the lid half. If it's not in place you'll get that grinding sound either way, disc or no disc. Sometimes it will still play a disc, just when it goes to speed up or slow down the disc it doesn't have a good hold on it because of the magnet being loose/missing, and that's where that awful noise comes from. If there's physically something else in the drive tearing up the discs then taking it apart would also let ya see whatever that is and remove it, so again yer jumping the gun a bit on just getting a new drive when it's already been stated by you that one does work, just sounds like it needs some attention is all.