any device can die or even come DOA.

flashing does NOT need soldering or extra hardware. however, the dumping of the key DOES need extra hardware.

upcoming ROD, broken solder spots on the GPU or the HANA chip.

..yes, it does.
Dosflash 1.7 comes with the ixtreme package, in fact.

it's not broken. of course the drive will not work when it's erased. erase it again and then just flash.

use dosflash. it's the drive that is freezing, or rather your chipset trying to identify the "dead" drive.

it does work, but test clips are expensive and usually don't last very long.

and quite soon, games will come with NXE on the disk anyways and not give you a choice wether to upgrade or not.

ROD can be ANY system failure. if your cat pissed on the MB while it was on, you'd get a ROD too.

no, you can not.

the globe chip doesn't bypass the key, it merely reads it from the drive flash. if there's no valid key in there, there's nothing for it to read either.

recent iprep versions should be using dosflash, and dosflash detects via cards without any modification.

the divx update has always been downloadable by anyone, not reserved for gold members, just like any game update.
gold is ONLY for online gaming and occassionally earlier demo downloads, but silver doesn't stop you from downloading and being online with the console.

lead free or not has absolutely nothing to do with temperatures. it is however true that lead free solder isn't as flexible and cracks more easily.

MS has no need to add new hardware to track. if they want to do that, they can easily add it with a required dashboard update.

from an original 120 gb drive.
the 160 GB HDD will work, but only use 120 GB.

iprep is running under dos, so there's no drivers involved anyways.

just click "cancel". but yeah, you may wanna install the driver again once you are done flashing. it does the same here, even though I told it not to look for it anymore.

you can just swap the drive.

the undo.bin ONLY works for the one drive it came from.