I turned on my Xbox for the first time in a long time and found that it's got some... issues. Here's the basic summary:

What I have
- softmodded (font exploit) Xbox with XBMC on it

What's happening
- it successfully boots to XBMC dash about 1/10 of the time I turn it on. Other attempts end up at Error 11. When it does load, it takes very long (say 60-90 seconds) to get to XBMC.

What I tried
- opened up the box, took out all cables connecting to DVD drive and reconnected, and even tried new IDE cable. No use.


My current guess is that there's a problem with the DVD drive itself and the machine refuses to boot without it. Is there any way that I'll be able to somehow bypass DVD drive check because I can still use Xbox for million things without DVD drive. If the procedure will let me use nothing but Linux, I guess that's better than nothing.

I have the ability to transfer files via FTP and run them. I wanna be able to do it without modchip and if possible, no soldering.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

Yeah your disk drive is on its way out If you dont want to get the modchip then you have 2 options you can do the tsop flash or you can just purchase another disk drive. I believe either way you will more then likly have to buy another dvd drive because you will have to boot the xbox to flash the tsop In the Buy/Sell/Trade on this site there are quite a few people that sell the disk drives at a good price. I know Alex548 has one for $25 shipped

Or if you don't fancy the TSOP solution or a replacement DVD you could try this. It claims to trick the Xbox into thinking there's a DVD drive there when there isn't, so should work for a softmod - and you can probably do it without soldering!

However .... notice that further on someone reckons that it fails, so you might have to do some fiddling to make it work.

Edit: But this one reckons that connecting pins 2 and 7 works.

Heimdall: any idea how I'll be able to fasten the wire without soldering between pins 2 and 7? The pins look pretty small for me to be able to tighten the wire manually.

I'll definitely be giving this a try and if it doesn't work out, I'll have to get a replacement drive like steveo1978 said, or look for a used box on the market

Any other suggestions would be great too. Thanks for the help.

I'd leave the cable in place and short pins 2 and 7 at the DVD end with a small paper clip, just to see if it works. If it does then you could just cut the paper clip really short and hold it in place with insulating tape.

But make sure you double check the connector orientation first.....!!

So I tried the instruction in this thread, but seems like the actual number of pin on real thing is different from the diagram (6+7 on actual connector, 6+6 on diagram).

I was sorta randomly messing around plugging it here and there and ended up having burning smell and Xbox shutting off.

It still boots though (to error 11) so I'm hoping I can recover it

Could someone help me find out which ones I should connect based on this picture? Thanks.

Same question posted in that other thread.

If you can get it to boot randomly I suggest that you ftp the game or slayers or evox with flashbios to the hdd and flash the tsop from there.If it is a winbond chip it will have to be the game approach but either will run from hdd if it is already softmoded.

If you continue trying to short the dvd drive you run the risk of trashing the pic16 chip and if that happens you will never get another dvd drive to work in the xbox if you are lucky.The worst case scenerio is the chip burns out completely and the xbox wont even boot to an error screen it will be in a coma.The pic16 controls all kinds of stuff outside the dvd drive including turning the mobo and psu on and off.It controls the fans some video selectors among other things.It is basically like a brain to it all.This was the part as well as the tsop that was replaced on the 1.6v version xbox.You can check the forums on the sickmods site to find more about the chip.

Yeah, uh... I kept trying with the pin-connecting method for DVD check disabling method and ended up having a nice loud beep, burning smell, and the Xbox permanently dying. Anyway it was one I got from a friend for free (because he thought it wasn't working, though it worked for me for a while), and I was ready to part with it so no huge deal.

That said, I plan on picking up another Xbox used from a local store sometime. My question: will I need to softmod the new one I'll be getting again or will replacing the hard drive with the one I took from the dead one do the trick? (assuming it didn't die from electric shock as well)
If that doesn't work, is there a way to transfer whatever the softmod works on to the new machine? Obviously my knowledge on this stuff is pretty shallow.

Thanks for all your help.

You can't just swap the hard drive - it is locked to the eeprom on the motherboard.

You'll need to start again with the softmod. There are two methods - gamesave, using Krayzie 1.1.1, and hotswap using xboxhdm and Kingroach NDURE 3.1.

Thanks. I'll have to look for one of the games then. Hopefully I can pick one up from a bargain bin or something.

I tried this with a piece of spare wire i had, i connected 2 to 7 as described on a standard Xbox...

It didn't work. Still showing error 12.........

Im obviously trying to avoid having to TSOP or flash my X2 BIOS as im not too confident about flashing.

Any updates chaps?