what wiki page? I seriously doubt they suddenly changed the filesystem, especially since they still can be read just fine with xplorer360 once the drive size is patched into it.
You know, there's a $#!tload of threads with topics such as "jtag", "xell", "freeboot" etc. All the info is there. Explain why exactly someone should bother writing down all that information again for you?
I'm pretty sure VCC is also used for the mtk chip itself, so if you lift it, it'll also disable the controller.. or they're linked internally, in which case lifting that one vcc pin wouldn't make a difference.
Unless Philips/BENQ has been rather stupid about the design.
probably one board where MS experimented with a different technique, i.e. maybe a run where the machines messed up, so some components had to be redone by hand.
The HD-DVD upgrade blew an e-fuse and now the old dump is invalid. You can probably use it again by adjusting the LDV counters using flashtool with your cpu key.