switching drives will do NOTHING for you. they check the game disks, not the firmware.

there is an issue on certain chipsets where there's an extra space after the model or serial number that does not get transferred. try flashing it on another PC.

you can only use external drives to store movies, pics and mp3s on.

it will not.

and yes, the drive stops spinning.

yes, it is, using xplorer360.

in my liteon experiments, it would only work if you used the eject button to eject the drive, the manual eject did not get it into the "dumping mode".

games that will support them either are released with support already or in case of some arcade games, will need an update. other games will not support them in any way, so don't expect to get to play cod4 with avatars.

no. to run linux, you need to have a working drive with valid key.
if you don't have the key, it is impossible to get it without having the drive that belonged to the console.

if you didn't heatgun it, you didn't fix it. you still have broken solder balls. they may be close enough together right now that the brief warming up you get from the first "bad" boot is enough to make them connect next time you start it up (since the board and solder expands when warmed).

about to RROD, you'll have to heatgun and x-clamp again.

that usually means you didn't do the halfways eject properly. it might not work at all for you if your drive doesn't eject.

I seriously doubt they added any kind of new security for a drive that hasn't even been used in the 360 in years anymore by them.

and if you can't use live, then you can't get the divx codec, end of story.

if the controller chip got fried during that, then you have no way anymore.

if it's already flashed, it no longer is a MS25, but acts as a MS28. Which means you have to perform the 10 second trick to flash it, which you can't with that chipset. You'll need a via card.

yeah, that works.

ah. you should've just told us that you are a f***ing idiot incapable of reading or using such incredibly complicated devices as a search function.
but, helpful as we are, we'll stop you from "clicking in circles" now.

it has been said above that it does work.

you can buy a replacement drive, dump the key from the liteon and flash the replacement drive. there's enough tutorials on how to do it.

just look at any flash tutorial for the samsung. you will have to dump the key from the hitachi and flash it into the samsung.