Recent Gadgetry… Part 2 (xbox, old school not 360)
I mentioned hooking up the diNovo Mini to an xbox, well, Jenn my loving wife got me a used xbox for x-mas as well. Since the dashboard (xbox Live was installed) was already updated, to 5069, I couldn’t use the simplier save game/action replay exploit. After digging around on the interweb I found some posts mentioning a method of unlocking the newest dashboards. It basicly used an application called ndure, which will install a new dashboard onto an unlocked xbox hard drive (it will do a lot more, such as backup and restore and other similar functions, but I only needed the new dashboard, as of now, probably will go more in depth this weekend). The hardest part about using this method was getting the drive unlocked; for those of you that don’t know, the xbox motherboard and harddrive have a paired key, which is used to unlock the drive for reading and writing. To unlock an xbox harddrive you can copy a song from an audio cd, then play the copied song from the harddrive, pause the song (or use a number of errors, I used error 12, unplugging the dvd drive’s power will allow for this error). After unlocking the harddrive, I had to hot-swap the drive to a computer into the primary ide master, this was the real problem for me as the only desktop I had at the time had only 1 ide port (it uses SATA drives) and i couldn’t use the cd-rom as a slave device (this application was a linux live cd, which couldn’t be ran on a bootable usb drive) without a master present.
So after trying to use my desktop several times, and fearing that I might destroy the harddrive of a motherboard if I kept hot-swapping I desided not to use my desktop. I had been tasked with trying to salvage 3 Dell Optiplex computers at work, and after discovering that all three had popped several capacitors, my boss said that they would be trashed and to not worry about them. I looked at the motherboards closly and discovered that between them there were enough good capacitors to make a single working motherboard, I removed and replaced the bad capacitors on one. I then used this newly salvaged desktop, with two ide controllers so I can have the cd-rom on secondary master and the xbox harddrive on primary master. I tried as the article I was reading to unlock and hot-swap the harddrive to no avail, but I wasen’t giving up. The reason I could not use the article’s method is that the live cd could not find the hard drive after hot-swapping, so I decided to try hooking up the harddrive to the computer, booting the computer, going into the device boot menu to stall the system, then swap the harddrive from the computer to the xbox, unlock the harddrive, switch the drive back to the computer and run the live cd. This method finally worked, and I can now install homebrew applications and other dashboards. I then installed XBMC and set it up to work on the samba network I already had in place.
