Ok so i repair this rrod xbox i got from ebay & the drive shows the open tray icon regardless of what dvd i put in.
Swapped the board into another dvd player in case the mechanics were at fault but still no show.
Decided to explore a bit deeper and hooked it up (ms28 on the dvd label) to Jungleflasher.
Get it to vender mode & read the firm that shows as ms25 spoofed ixtreme 1.6.
Saved firmware & key but then notice that the key is showing all zero's?
Whats the situation here, next move?
Possible that both used drives have bad lasers?
I have 2 Hitachi based xbox's i could swap the lasers from, wrth a go?
Or is the row of zero's for a key the reason it wont read disks?

that row of 000000000 means invalid key.

Hmmm! as i suspected.
Does this mean the drive itself has basically been stuffed up by the previous user or am i just getting a bad read through JF?
Any possible next steps i can take and is this the reason for the "open tray" message im getting?
I have the firmware spoofed ms25 dump saved, anything there i can use?

Does this mean the drive is rendered useless even though its able to dump the firmware?
Ejects & spins fine just says open tray?
Worth trying different software to get the key?

It means you just wasted your money buying that xbox. The drive has an invalid key and no software can change that fact. you may want to try a different sata card, but i doubt that will make a difference in your case as most rrod xboxs have lost keys.

the key on the drive must be the same as the xbox's key. there are no known methods to read the key off the motherboard at this time. so using a key from your other drive won't do any good as you need the key to match the motherboards. so yes it has been "stuffed up" by the previous user. IT seems he has flashed a zeroed out iXtreme 1.6 firmware to the drive

maybe you should e-mail him and ask him if he dumped the drive's firmware before he decided to flash a blank ixtreme on it?