Excessive heat was never really the problem.  So long as the x-clamps are actively warping the motherboard you have a risk of non-lead solder connections cracking, the perdominant cause for 3rod.

Just as an FYI, it is normal for the green light to blink when you don't have the dvd drive connected (SATA) to the 360.

You could also have a bad cable; sometimes an incomplete connection can cause really random hdmi problems.  HANA chips go bad pretty easily though, there's not much you can do to prevent it either.

That's correct neon; even a d162c will not read x360 discs until it has been flashed with the appropriate firmware.

There's a reason why ixtreme was not released in multi-speed variants.  If you are planning to use xbox live (backups or not), using a non-standard speed is considered a risk.

Generally reading a samsung firmware requires power cycling the drive at the correct interval.  The last one I did was with MTKflash, although you should be able to figure out when by reading a tutorial.

My understanding (and I could be wrong) is that the benq and lite-on are basically the same drive, just with a different controller.  Benq was a division at Phillips, and lite-on bought that division.

You can lock the drive with hdutils on your PC, or any atapi utility for that matter.

Get your hands on hdutils if you can though, it makes the process much easier to not mess up.

I know there were talks of modifying the 605 firmware to avoid the motor reversing requirement.  I don't know if anything came out of that, but it may be worth looking into.

My brother knocked my modified 616 on the floor before I had a chance to try it

Not true.  Using reverse engineering to modify a piece of software is not copyright infringement.  Only if the source material for the original work is viewed can the resulting work be considered a derivitive work; ixtreme can't even be considered for infringement.

http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/xbox_360_hd_dvd_review/

According to this, the hd-dvd drive will not play xbox360 games.

We'll need more details.  Which program are you using to read the images, schtrom? Which firmware did you flash it with, what's the message that you saw while attempting that?

You may find your answer simply by pasting the error (or part of it) into a search.

I use lite-on drives with verbatim media for burning DL discs, never had any problems.

You'll probably need another drive to read the original discs though.  Typically the best solution is a Kreon drive (which is what I use.)

Gig is correct, the drive will not flash without the correct version of dosflash.  Prior to the latest versions (1.6), only the via cards are supported. 

Since your system is set up with raid, you won't be able to use the raid controller to do the flashing anyway.  Make sure when you aquire the port address your system is configured the same way it will be when doing the flash.

No, the command prompt in windows is not ms dos, it's a 32bit application that has some functionality of dos.  You'll need to make a bootdisk with either a floppy or usb drive(so long as your computer can boot from one).  Easiest way to get started with that is iprep.

As for conductive paint, should be ok... just make sure you don't spill it.

The readme that you get with any particular version should detail how to use the parameters.  Just make sure you use an older version if you want to follow the readme, the newest version doesn't use the same.

Thanks for sharing Gig, I'll be putting together one of these next week (although I opted for the max3232 design).

I can't really tell what's going on with your board design from the pictures, it's difficult to see where your connections are from the bottom side of the board, and the top doesn't really help.

Some thoughts:  bunghoolio wasn't referring to a mistake in your wiring where an adjacent wire would touch (short).  Crossover cables are common in serial communications.  A crossover cable is for changing the Rx to Tx connections to allow for two systems to communicate with each other;  the Tx and Rx are adjusted correctly in the circuit diagram already, so if you are using any type of crossover cable, the connections will be reversed.

In short even if you are able to short the Rx-Tx connections and have successful echo, the connections could still be reversed.

Otherwise, if you are certain your connections are correct the next step is to check that the resistors read correctly, and of course check the transistors.  You can probably connect a couple AA batteries for nearly 3.3v in order to check their function.

Ceramique is a permanent solution, something considered for ram-sinks and special applications where there aren't any available tie-downs.  I understand that with excessive cooling and the right motions ceramique can be loosened, but it's not the kind of stuff you'd want to put on a 360 gpu or cpu.

GTA4 has been widely reported to have lockup problems.  I've played it and encountered none, but it's probably worth trying a different original.  Arakon is correct, your laser could be dieing or just adjusted incorrectly.

Just get another samsung and take the controller board out of the one you have.  No spoofing or flashing complexity there.