Thanks guys.  Yes, I knew that spoofing the liteon with 1.4 on another drive would work but lead to banning.  It just wasn't clear to me before if the spoofing part was needed if someone was already banned or didn't connect to live.  I see that it is, with perhaps an exception for a launch box.  But I don't have a launch box, and don't see myself buying one considering how volatile they seem to be.  Many thanks for clearing all this up.

By "card", it sounds like he switched drive PCBs to not have to reflash.  Sounds like maybe he carried his problem with it.  Try putting the PCB that belongs to the new drive back, and flashing it with your key.

I'm sorry, I didn't mean to hijack the thread.

Are you able to install any game to the HD, or do you have any already installed?

That's terrible.  I have an Xbox that I got only a month ago.  It's frozen on me 4 times so far.  The first was after playing about 6 hours straight.  I assumed it got too hot from me playing so very long so I turned it off.  The last time it did it after two hours.  My warranty is already gone, as I've flashed my liteon, so I'm on my own.  The last post suggests this is an imminent gpu failure.  Should I do the X-Clamp to buy me as much time as possible before my board dies?  Or am I mistaken in my diagnosis?

As a bit of extra info, these games were installed to the HD.  The first three times were on the original 60GB, the last one was on my 120GB BEVS.  This should rule out the disc/dvd-rom.

Thanks!  No, I understand perfectly.  That was a great post.  Really reinforces alot of things I was thinking but was unsure about.

One more question, somewhat on topic:

Drive spoofing.  Is this required to have a different model drive working, or is it just to prevent banning from Live?  That is, if I exchanged my drive X for a drive Y, flashed with the key from the old one but otherwise kept the original firmware, would the xbox not accept it at all?  Or would it work but get banned from Live?

I know I'm only asking for wild speculation, but why didn't they disable the serial port?  Why hasn't each new drive completely fixed the previous one's vulnerability?  Are they trying and just not as good at securing as others are at cracking?

Besides disabling the serial on the liteon, why on earth does the liteon even spit out it's key over serial at all?  It doesn't need to send it to the console, in fact it can't over serial anyway.  If there's not a technical reason, it seems like a big programming mistake.  All I can think of is for MS's own repair facilities, so they can change out a broken dvd-rom without replacing the motherboard as well, with minimal effort.  (Save time and money)

Of course you'd have to add on major hardware, I wouldn't expect just to flash something and boom you can store on your Xbox HD.  I was thinking more of an addon sitting next to the xbox (or maybe in place of the DVD-rom?) with the user's own HD attached to it. Not the xbox's drive.  It would attach via the SATA cable that would normally go to the DVD-Rom.  Some kind of switch to go between the real DVD-Rom and the fake one, like the Blaster 360.  I suppose an LCD display at least to be able to select the ISO.

Since this would be (from the xbox's view) essentially a DVD-rom replacement, I don't see how a vulnerable box would be needed.  We'd still need the key from the original drive, but that should be all.

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If the Flatmii works, then the WiiZii is certainly feasible, since it would use the same concept.  Whether it is real, we'll just have to wait and see.

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Man, I wish I had time to really contribute to this kind of thing.  Between work and college, I barely see my 360.  The arduino is my full extent of microcontroller programming.  (It's awesome)  It would take me years to try and learn enough to make a SATA DVD-ROM emulator in hardware.

You guys ever think that the lessons learned from the 360 would lead to an uncrackable next gen? (Xbox 720 or whatever)  They've plugged the timing attack, but not the dvdrom or HD firmware vulnerabilities.  Is it somehow impossible for them to seal these cracks?  Sign the drive's firmware with the CPU key?

If you had an old vulnerable board, did the timing attack, got the CPU key and installed linux, you could possibly run windows from a VM on it...  But it would be completely unusable.  This was done on a PS3, and it took HOURS to boot it up, and just opening notepad took several minutes.

But no, no version of windows will run natively on a PowerPC.

A couple weeks ago, a team released info for looks like a dvd-rom emulator for the Wii that reads images off of a hard drive.
http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/16/matrix-wiizii-mod-hooks-to-external-sata-hdd-for-speedy-iso-load/

Now, I'm not saying it would be trivial, but would it be technically possible to make such a thing for the 360?  Considering how pretty much everything about the drives firmwares are understood, what other major roadblocks would there be?

This thread may help.

http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/39309975/m/593004115931

I didn't find any mention of it via search, so I thought that I'd share that the newest version of XBC runs just fine under Windows 7 Beta.  For me, at least.

My mistake, I misread that you were using the connectivity kit.  I can't speak for your own circuits, obviously.  I say if it works for you, keep doing it.  Just making clear for the other readers here that it's not needed for the ck3.  Maybe we'll save a couple fried liteons.

Also, looking at my ck3 just now, why is the eject button a toggle?  Shouldn't this be a momentary?  Is there something that takes advantage of being able to hold down the eject, or was it just a cost saving thing to keep it the same part as the mode button?

Although I see many users commenting on this kind of thing, I'm pretty sure the admins don't like discussion of warranty fraud.  Why should the manufacturer be responsible for something YOU broke?  Sure, it MIGHT fail for reasons of it's own and would have anyway, but there's really no way to tell after you've been in there.  It's not like the drives have a known issue like the RRoD.  If you want the warranty, dont mess with it.  Me personally, I take a razor and cut the stickers, just so I'm not tempted.

If you look at the traces on your CK3, you can see that there are no components (capacitors or otherwise) between that power switch and the power connector for that drive.  If nothing else, it's safer for people not moving around the parts so much or frantically plugging and putting the power connector in upside-down.

Liteon/Falcon, no update for me.

Maybe that's why I didn't think of it before...

A kreon drive is required to read the fake data, and no burners can put this data on the disc like the original.  They burn it with this info stored differently and the flashed firmware on the Xbox reads the data and acts like it's stored the same way as an original.

The copied disc is not 1:1 the same as an original, it does not have the hard to read data stored the same way, that's why you can read it with anything and burn it.

Here are some threads that may help.  You should have found these first and then asked if they didn't help, and said so.

http://www.xboxhacker.net/index.php?topic=10186.0
http://www.xboxhacker.net/index.php?topic=6290.0

The question to ask is has it been opened up, what has been done to it?  If it's really only the drive that is having a problem, then sure, that's a good price.  I'm not personally able to diagnose from the 'open tray' message, or else I would tell you.  Try searching around here for that and see how it was resolved.  Was is a laser replacement?  New drive?  Something failing on the board? 

I know that you've only just started here, but alot of people get upset when someone joins and asks questions that have been answered many times.  When you ask a question, show that you've at least looked and more people will likely to help.  We all enjoy a good diagnostic, not answering the same questions over and over because people want to be told instead of looking.

You won't be able to just put your drive in there without additional work.  Even more so if the drives aren't the same type (there are a few).  Read up about extracting keys from firmware and spoofing drives.