If it's so cold, i hope condensation wasn't a factor in this.  I suppose someone not following guides very well could have erased the drive without extracting the key?  You don't need the case off for that, do you?  I think you were implying that all of the stickers looked untouched, but I'm not sure.

Are you saying that your computer instantly freezes immediately pressing erase, or after the erase is finished?  You're supposed to power-cycle the drive for one second, at just the right moment, but the guides are generally vague on when that moment is.  I've only done my liteon, but I vaguely remember there being a line of periods growing, and then it gave another message.  As soon as I got the other message, I power cycled and it worked for me.  No freeze and got the right status the first time.  I must be lucky.  I used an embedded via raid, but I assume that the same chipset on a card would act the same.  I'll have to see what it is when I get home.

In the meantime, if you search the forums I'm sure you can find people reporting which chipsets worked the best for them.  I'd try the one with the most good results, and avoid the ones that have people asking all the questions about freezing.  If you do find a good card that works great, be sure to post it here for others.

Is looking at the packaging for "Made in Singapore" the only way to tell before buying them?  Do all the picky people buy them all in person, or is there another way?  I haven't seen anything to suggest a product number or similar would be certain, so that makes buying online a gamble, right?

I hear so often of people frying their liteons this way, but this is the first I read about another drive.  I was wondering why it was happening so much with the liteons and not the others, same power connection after all.

I suppose it was just eight months of people buying xboxes with liteons and most flashing them at the same time (after the probe came out and 1.5 was released)

If you're talking about using a laptop to flash, aside from usb I believe you'd also need an eSATA card for it (or a laptop with an eSATA port already).

To summarize what I got from Kreon's msg about angle 359:  Having an angle 359 isn't an error, and isn't bad.  What was bad was that the earlier versions of the IX firmware (pre-1.4) didn't handle it correctly when it jittered (returned a 360 instead of a 0, detectable by MS as definately having flashed).  So if you have 1.4 or newer, you don't have the bug, don't worry about it.

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Just to be clear, I've never had any problem getting any of my backups to play.

I just like to be as informed as possible.  The more I know about how disc security, how backup creation works, and how the firmware emulates the original, the better I'll be at making good backups.  This should also reduce my chances of being banned from Live.

I'm curious by nature, and I like to fix things (computers, tv's, radios, anything).  The more I understand about them the better I'll be at taking care of my own problems.

This forum has a great wealth of information and has been a great read for me.  The moderators do a great job of cleaning up the seemingly constant barrage of the same things over and over.  I try and give back to the forum when I can.

Thanks Arakon, I didn't realize.  I've never used ceramics.

xboxhacker is hosted by xbox-scene, shouldn't be a problem.

Yes, capacitors are polar.  Unless you specifially bought non-polar caps.

0800 is required to make it a usable drive in windows (drive letter, let me read discs, and all that).  This is not required to flash the drive in Windows.

Am I understanding this correctly?

Just to clarify Arakon's post, you WILL need to dump the key before you flash.  So you will need some extra hardware.

The easiest route is to get the CK3 & probe, or get the Xtractor & Spear.  There are plenty of tutorials, search for jungleflasher.

You don't have to buy these kits, you can make your own adapter if you have some technical experience and soldering skills.

Tommix, something to remember is that things can change quickly.  Remember to check the post date on anything you're reading as it might be outdated.  Dosflash may have not worked with the liteon before a couple weeks ago, but neither did anything else a couple weeks ago (for flashing that is).

Tommix, If you have the CK3 kit, all you really need to do is attach a needle to one pin in the the power connector.  I haven't got one in front of me right now but I'm sure you can find a pinout for that connector around here somewhere.

Sorry, I should have got that from your first post.  If it works fine in the xbox it points to a problem with your xtractor or cable from it.

If you're using a needle then how do you say that you soldered to R707?  I was wondering why you would have soldered to a via instead of bridging the TX points.

As for the conductivity of your needle, just measure the ohms across the thing with a multimeter.  If it's close to zero, you're good.

I've only used the ck3 kit with spear, it has a nice idiot led that lets you know that you're making contact.  But I must say that I never had a problem with it making contact.  It the pin was in the hole, it was always good.

I'd try and re-test that home-made adapter of yours.  Make sure that some connection didn't come loose, bad solder joint, or maybe somehow broken or fried your max232 or whichever you used.

I would delete the update on your unbanned console and download it again.

As for putting the codec on the banned one, as Arakon says, there is no way to do this.  There are many threads about this situation and it always comes to this:

If you are banned and you aren't using the NXE, you can either keep your divx codec or get NXE.  There is no way to install the codec without Live, and the NXE update makes you have to redownload the codec.

I would say double-check all of your connections, but I'm sure you already done this ten times.

You said the adapter worked for you before, but in DOS.  Try your old method and see if it works for you.  If it does, then you know the hardware is good and you have a software/driver prob with Windows.

If the old proven method doesn't work then it points a hardware problem.  Do you know this drive is good?  Has someone else already tampered with (damaged) the drive before they brought it to you?

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On a side note, I wonder about all these people frying liteons?  They use the same connector as the other drives, so why do people seem to fry liteons more often?

If your are trying to use that 60w psu, I would reconsider.  I can't tell by looking at the pictures what the form factor of that psu is, but I'm sure you can find a higher rated one.  Remember to look for one rated as high as your current one, 150w.  More importantly make sure each rail is as high or higher.  For example, even if you find a 160w psu, but the 12v rail isn't as high as your xbox's adapter, keep looking.  It looks like your board only consumes 105w, but I wouldn't cut it very close.

This is the second post I've seen about this.  Did you download that codec onto that drive originally using another console?  The reason I ask is that when you buy arcade games, they are linked to your profile and your console.  You can take them to another console, or sign in on another and download them, but if it's not the same as the first one, you need to be connected to live to play.

This prevents you from buying a game and installing it on all your friend's consoles.  You can, but only one of the consoles can play at a time this way.

The mpeg4/xvid/divx codec is signed to your console the same way, so I'm wondering if it's treated the same way.  Just a theory, but I don't have any confirmation.

The DMI may be different across discs of the same game, they were just made in a different factory.  There was another thread about this.

Basically, these tools (ABGX and Mulleter) are great for checking checksums so you know everything copied off fine, but verification is only really needed if you downloaded the ISO from somewhere, not ripped your own.  Anyone ripping can submit to the database, and people use it to verify that their downloaded copy has all the same parts as what others had.  No one put the wrong part in (from another game), or it didn't get corrupted while downloading.

If you rip your own games from your own ORIGINAL discs, then you already know all the parts really do belong to that game.

Generally speaking, though, DMI is all you would probably expect to be different.  If the DMI reads off the ORIGINAL disc the same each time, it's not wrong.  It's just that the database has info from a disc that was different.

Also, the angle 359 thing isn't really a bad rip or a problem with the image, just a warning that there was a bug in the earlier firmware versions of the Xbox drive that didn't respond to that angle correctly.