Read your message and tell me why I shouldn't infer you are charging for modding services ??  You speak of customers, free repair and warranty...
Give me a break.

You've got to be kidding me !!

You are modding people's systems, charging them for it and thereby profiting by performing illegal activities and you have the nerve to ask on a public forum ??

It's folks like you that ruin it for the true hobbyists and you deserved to be locked up for your greed and stupidity.

FYI... MS has wised up to this and has replaced the older warranty stickers with new ones that can't be removed with hair dryer approach.

All 360's coming back from repair have this new warranty sticker now.

I'm still not banned.

I have one of the very susceptible Hitachi 47DJ drives.

I purchased this 360 back in Dec. 2005 and have been on Live MANY times.

I 1st flashed my drive shortly after Birdy came out with the Birdy Packy that contained Xtreme hack 1.3.

The drive wasn't reflashed again until the day of the bans when I flashed my drive with C4E 2.4 stealth firmware. (Spring update taken the day it came out)

I have never "played" any copies online but I have been signed into live countless times playing backups. I have also played XBLA games online (UNO as an example) with this machine all the time.

Since the day of the banning I kept my machine disconnected, connecting only to check to see if I was banned.

I haven't been banned yet, have played many games with the network cable disconnected (including pirates and crackdown) and just checked the status codes of my machine and the Z code is still 0000:0000

I guess I consider myself lucky and am sitting tight to see what happens.

BTW.
I also dloaded the halo 3 beta with an original crackdown disk but only went online for a couple of minutes to try it out and haven't tried since.

Location : Canada
Drive : Hitachi 47DJ
Firmware : C4EVA_XTRM-HITACHI_v2_4_Stealth (Installed 5/17/07 -- AFTER Spring update)
Downloaded Halo 3 Beta with Backup of Crackdown.  Didn't play it online.  I just loaded it up to see if it worked.

5/18/07 - Logged into XBL and downloaded XBLA Mini Golf title.  No problems, no messages, NOT BANNED (yet)

I concur with this statement.
I tried to burn with my Plextor 716SA drive and didn't have any luck at all.
Picked up the Pioneer 111-D and haven't had a single problem since !

I like yourself was hesitant at 1st as well but decided to take assume the risk last week.
I used the Executer Connectivity kit and this version of Birdy flash and flashed 2 Hitachi drives 47d drives w/o incident !
Each one took about 10 - 15 seconds and that included backing up the original firmware !

Doesn't get much easier than that !
Thanks again...  Just to clarify (sorry).  The key extraction and firmware patching is completely automated with this ?
I'm really tempted to try this out tonight

Wow !!  thanks for the quick response !!

I have the executer Drive connectivity kit so Mode B is just a matter of pressing a button.
What about that SCPcreator.exe ?
Also what about patch.scp and restore.scp ?
Does anything need to be done with these files prior to running flasher.exe ?

I've never flashed my drive and have been reading and reading and reading trying to get all my facts straight.
Where I'm confused is with this Birdy Flasher..  Is this as simple as it seems ?
Does this application automatically extract your drive key, patch it to the firmware and then write it all ?
Or is there still some prep work required prior to using this ?

I'm asking this because modding your drive's firmware has evolved sooo much since it was 1st made available and most of the step by steps include using DOS, having to dump your drive key and patch firmware.
I haven't seen a step by step for someone who has never modified their firmware yet and wants to use Birdy Flasher to do so..

A quick tutorial for someone who is preparing to flash their drive for the 1st time using Birdy Flasher would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks.