Prevent HDD Crippling - NAND write protect diagram Posted by XanTium | November 16 21:58 EST | News Category: Xbox360

From eurasia.nu: [QUOTE] GodzIvan strikes again, this time with a diagram which simply write protects the NAND flash in the Xbox 360 by connecting WP to ground pin (if the flash type has different pinout, just find the datasheet to locate WP). This modification does not stop the ban from M$, but it prevents deletion of the HD installation certificates required by games which means you can still install them on the hard drive. In order to update the kernel this mod must be disabled; a simple switch solution comes to mind. [/QUOTE] News-Source: eurasia.nu

anyone tried this yet??

this is awesome.. after xtreme LT comes out, i'll flash my drive and then do this. ill install a little switch on the back of my console.

awesome thanks GodzIvan
thought this was an odd feature to be banned in the first place. is it needed to install dlc games like gta iv:new edition or something?

Let me get this straight. Even after being banned (HDD crippled already). If I were to ground the WP pin, I would be able to install and load games from te hdd?

There would be no problems moving the HDD to another console without the save/profile to be corrupted.

Thanks in advance

ill definitely be doing this modification when the next ixtreme comes out.

banned from xbox live for modfication, w/e... but disabling my hardware...not cool.



no. this modification has to be done BEFORE your banned.
grounding that pin enables write protection, which prevents hard drive installs being disabled when you are banned from xbox live.

Thanks a lot. Thats what it seemed like. Write Protect is active when pin is low. I'll also link it through a DIP switch.

Was hoping for a solution for the already crippled consoles.

So if you were to do this to a new xbox (unbanned) and it gets hit next ban wave you'll be able to transfer the hard drive to another xbox without it saying all your saves have been corrupted.

Right?

And you'll still be able to play/install games on the hdd on the banned xbox

Darn too bad its a little to late for a lot of people (including me) but a great discovery none the less.

Interesting.

So just add a little toggle switch in between, so you can update firmware? But now what if you get banned while the switch is off, while updating firmware?.... isn't that possible?

Disconnect your xbox from the internet when you update the firmware?...

That way you can have the switch in off and still update it...

The certs dont get deleted until your banned, which happens when your try and connect to xbox live.

At least thats my take on it.

Yeah Go , Cripple the weaklings at Microsoft !!!










Woah ! that sounded HARSH !

And M$ can just add a write check and ban who ever write protect their NAND.

So if you are not banned before then you'll guaranty a ban now. Well at least your HDD is good.

thats what i was thinking.

BUT, what you could do is set your console to auto login to xbox live then have a micro controller setup to set the write protection pin low for the first couple seconds, then set it back to high after you've signed in.

that way you can do system updates without having to flip a switch, and if your banned you'll see it right away and it will be automatically prevent hard drive disabled.

Nice find!!! Is there an alternative point on the board? Soldering on a TSOP chip leg is not that easy to do.

Pfff they'd only do that if this info was displayed publicly where they could easily reach it. Otherwise how would they know?

....wait

Dammit >.<

ive only done it a couple times but it should be fairly easy, the solder tends to flow to each leg, you have to put on a LOT of solder to create a bridge between the pins.

Well, I don't think doing this mod violate Xbox Live Terms of service. It voids your warranty for sure but it does not allow you to run backups or cheat on Xbox Live. Would MS really ban people for blocking write on the Nand?

im guessing this doesnt work on already banned and used boxes?

1) What kind of changes and updates affect the NAND?
2) Would it only be the NXE updates?
3) When should it not be protected? Should we be leaving the switch ON (Write protected) most of the time? or OFF?

no.



I believe the only time you would need write protection off would be for dashboard updates.
It should only be turned on when your first connection to xbox live, that way if your banned, it wont be able to disable your hard drive.

If you see the message on your Xbox that you have been banned it means that your Nand has been modified. I wonder if anyone who had a nand backup of their current kernel just before they got banned could restore it using the JTAG hack to remove the HDD crippling flag in the Nand and recover HDD install function.

How simple, why haven't other people figured this out before?

That's exactly the point of backing it up, so they can restore it.

What we need is someone with a NAND backup who subsequently got banned. Restore the NAND, ground WP and then see what happens when Live tries to ban them again. Since they have a NAND backup and are already banned, they'd have nothing to lose.

I thought restoring a backup of the nand after beind banned would already lift the HDD crippling. I would like to see someone connect to XBL with this mod and see MS try to write to it LMAO

Great find but this just seems riskier than firmware modding. Who says you could only get banned on startup anyway ? Im sure plenty of people have been disconnected mid session.

because the previous ban waves never disabled the hard drive.

Yeah, but this is a hell of a lot simpler than doing everything it takes to actually read/write the NAND.

I dont think LIVE will try and ban them again since im sure it has already collected all the important info such as console ID, serial number and maybe even mac address. If your banned you could bet that they have blocked any console with matching information from signing in.

Doesn't seem risky to me. Maybe risky if you haven't already been flagged for a ban, but I'm going on the assumption that currently they're able to nail us all, it's just a matter of time. I'm convinced my console is flagged, and I'm dying to download Sgt. Pepper's tomorrow--this would come in quite handy. It would be nice to think that if I am destined to be banned, at least I can prevent my console from ever knowing about it.

Well, as long as you're connected to live (while you're still not banned) keep write protect ON. If you would want to do updates; download it off the site, burn it, and do it through disc install offline (with write protect OFF) and not through xbox live.

Not true. It's already been demonstrated that flashing a pre-ban NAND doesn't allow you to connect to Live if you've already been banned, but some handshaking does take place and you do get banned again (lose the HD ripping ability, etc.). If this hack works, it would prevent that from happening, since the NAND couldn't be written. The perfect test scenario.

I agree. I on the other hand dont believe i have been banned or flagged. I have called MS and checked my warranty info via their site and i appear to still be safe. Then again, im not going on again till the new firmware is out. I hope it helps.

Well why haven't you found it before. Finding modification on to alter the system behavior on a system like the Xbox 360 is really hard. Every major component behavior is supervised either by another component or remotely by Xbox live protocols. There's no way to tell how the Xbox will react to a modification on something like the Nand chip. We are only speculating on how this baby works until MS actually trigger something to make it so. In this case, maybe MS might come out with a scheme to make lives even worse for banned consoles users.

GodzIvan took the risk of trying this mod for us but he could have well triggered a special security measure that would have prevented the xbox to boot at all... maybe even permanently. The fact that your console is banned doesn't mean MS can't connect to your console and read some stuff on it. When the console try to connect to Xbox Live even if it is banned, there's some sort of handshaking, during this period of time, MS can probe your console and even modify it. Maybe even burn another eFuse without updating the kernel so it would prevent the Xbox to boot.

Sorry for you if you got banned before knowing this solution existed but don't blame anyone for not having found this solution earlier.

I think this will have side effects on the behavior of the console, when the 360 realizes it can't write to nand, it may think setting got corrupted or something and cause configuration errors while the WP is grounded. This WP pin functionality has been well known since the first dual nand mods years ago, GodzIvan just rescued old info.

Someone who make this fix, plz post your results.

Technically it does violate the ToS so you could get banned.

MS has already banned people who used the 12v fan mod which also does not allow backups.

You'll still get banned because the update contains a list of banned console IDs. There's a article where someone decrypted the NAND dump and found the list.

99% of people don't seem to grasp that concept

Could you link to that, I missed it some how

Now that really sucks. They've actually bothered including that huge list of IDs with the update. No wonder the updates are so huge and barely change anything.

Guess you'd still have to stick to backing up your NAND.bin prior to any updates expected.

http://xorloser.com/?p=45
There's an old list from 08 http://xorloser.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/crl.txt

Well... I suppose this is good news for those that have yet to get their boxes banned.

I have one that's already been banned but there is one at the 'rents house that has not been online in a few months. This could get fun. I like hardware mods like this- I feel like I learn more when I do stuff like this.

Would flashing a NAND with a pre-banning NAND image allow restoration of hard drive install certificates?

Although at 5 bytes per consoleID and (if you believe the internet) 1,000,000 consoles banned, that's around 5 MB of just revoked console IDs. Early consoles only had 16MB of NAND flash didn't they? So it would surely getting getting tight on space in there if they were to include the IDs of all the banned consoles.

it could, but from what i read you need your cpu key in order to do a full nand restore.

I told my cousin this would happen after microsoft messed with the wrong crowd, and there it is....LOL

he'll be happy cause he's banned but i'm definitely going to do this after LT for my own security.

and for those crying about what if....m$ finds out and messes things up even more: you're banned already, don't connect to the network, besides there's always risks with modding, for god's sake i looked like a surgeon trying to solder the laser-cut legs on my Wii but I just had to do it and accept the worst, good thing it worked though...

Thanks GodzIvan.

this is great news to keep people who are using free60 hacks to keep their dashboard from updating!!!!
Now someone should find an alternative point because i also hate ic legs... who wants to break out the magnifying lens!!!!

A little off topic:

Could I not extract the Nand.bin of a banned console and non-banned console and write to the banned console's NAND with the non-banned .bin after changing it's cpu/dvd key?

Banned NAND -> PC
Non-Banned NAND -> PC
Edit Non-Banned NAND with an HEX editor
PC -> Banned NAND

May not "Unban" the banned console. But will it not at least heal it's HDD Crippleness?

I thought the banned ID list was for people who were game save sharing, not for live bans.

Also, could this prevent gamesaves and gamertags from getting corrupted when switched to a non-banned console?

Now what if they decide to release an update, but your console is banned, so you run it via DVD, CD, Flash Drive, etc, and in that update, it checks the 360 to see if it's been banned or not, and if it is, it disables the HDD Install that way, because you set the NAND to write enabled?

You're better off not updating it at all after you've been banned and saved your HDD Install feature.

I believe this will work as an alternate point. This shot is from the underside of a Falcon motherboard. Directly underneath the NAND.



And you can restore NAND without CPU key, which does restore the HDD install functions - Just needs to be a recent backup pre-ban:
http://forums.xbox-scene.com/index.php?sho...p;#entry4567518

They would then have to include the live banned console IDs in a banned console list.


Can you test the 2 points with a continuity meter to make sure they are indeed the same points?