So just as a bit of back ground I have modded 2 xboxes thus far. One with a chip and the other with a hot swap soft mod.

Recently I came across a Developers Kit at work (game dev) and I was told it doesn't work. They told me to just take it, so I did, at the very least I could use it as a parts box.

Opened it up and it seems to be mechanically fine. all the drives power up, the LEDs all work. Nothing seems to be "wrong" with it physically.

The hard drive is a default OEM retail drive. It doesn't boot the xbox however, just a black screen and the large LED flashes green. So I took the OEM drive from one of my other Xbox's and tried to boot it. The Xbox logo comes up but about 10sec later the screen freezes.

I would like to get this box running but I don't know what to do. What should I try?

Will drives from different xboxs boot? Or does the locking system in place prevent that?

Anyway any advice I can get would be great thanks.

First, I'm not an expert but since no one else is rushing to post here some ideas. It would be helpful for some error codes if you had any. It sounds like the drive system files are corrupted. I had this happen to one of mine. No error code, just froze on the logo. Had to re-up the system files. No you cannot just take out the drive from another system, they are married (drive & Motherboard) to that system. You can put in another drive but you will need to recover the eeprom/hard drive password from the motherboard to use on another drive. You will need to setup the new drive on another computer or modded console. The tools cost $12 on eBay for a eeprom reader. Or with your modded box, recover the eeprom and use configmagic. I am not sure what is different in the Dev kit, but you might loose those files but either way you can re-up the original Microsoft files and boot it up back to normal. If nothing else, use xboxhdm_v1.9.zip to rebuild the original Microsoft files to normal. Read those tutorials.

Thanks for the reply Broadband_Junky.

So I did some more investigation.

I took the devkit and booted it up in my chipped Xbox v1.6 (Xecuter 3CE), just to see what would happen. It returns error code 6 from the 256k BIOS flash screen. Seems the devkit hardrive is really messed up, some (if not all) of the files are corrupt.

At this point all I really want to do is recover the eeprom/hard drive password for this devkit and then drop in a new drive.

But if the OEM drive is messed up and was never softmoded then getting the eeprom is impossible correct?

Is my only option to build an eeprom reader and get it from the motherboard? Or is their another way to do this I am missing?