NOOB questions

[sjalsip]

So i am new to this and I have flashed drives before but I have no clue what jtag, xell , nand flashing, freeboot or any of that is.  Is there tutorials for this? Can someone explain what all of these things are and what the benefits are?

[Arakon]

You know, there's a $#!tload of threads with topics such as "jtag", "xell", "freeboot" etc. All the info is there. Explain why exactly someone should bother writing down all that information again for you?

[sjalsip]

I know that there are a lot of threads I have done the search and have been looking for a while now but I could not find out exactly what it all is so i figured that some one would be nice enough to at least give me links to threads that would be helpful

[daba210]

@ sjalsip

I understand that all the jargon can be a little overwhelming, but if your original post had indicated you were wanting to contribute to the community, and needed help on where to look for information, I'm sure you would have found Arakon's reply much friendlier (I think :p, course he could just be in a bad mood ) I was much the same as yourself, but when I explained what I wanted to do, Redline99 was more than happy to point me in the right direction. Since he took the time to do it for me, I'll do it for you.

- JTAG is a method of testing printed circuit boards, initially only using a boundary scan, but since then it has come a long way. For the purposes of the Xbox 360, you only need to know the JTAG exploit is a method of accessing the Xbox 360's onboard nand (pre 849x kernal revision) to allow read/write access, booting of Xell, and other nifty things.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Test_Action_Group

- Xell is a second stage bootloader for the Xbox 360, I believe it was compiled by members of the Free60 movement, but anyone feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. It allows the execution of unsigned code such as Gentoo or other Linux distros on the Xbox 360 from either a network, USB, or a CD/DVD-ROM. It also allows us to discover the CPU key to decrypt the KV.
http://www.free60.org/XeLL

- NAND Flashing: Similar to what you know already, NAND flashing is simply the process of replacing data already stored on the NAND (KV, Dashboard etc) with our own, it can be performed either using the JTAG hack (pre 849x) or using Infectus 2 (any 16mb NAND console).

- Freeboot (current version v0.2) is an Xbox 360 rebooter than allows us to reboot into a patched version of the latest MS dash, at the moment it requires a cygnos 2 chip to store the second NAND flash, however a single NAND program does exist - XBR v0.5, though it is still quite 'buggy' and less stable than Freeboot.
http://www.xbox-scene.com/xbox1data/sep/EkVAVAZlpABAegQKdv.php

There are hundreds upon hundreds of tutorials on here and many other sites, if you read, read, read and then ask questions, you'll find the people on here far more receptive and willing to help, if you don't you get a response like you did here. Don't be put off however, remember he's a mod, and gets hundreds of the same mundane questions everyday, so keep at it (:

I believe it was Interloper that said "Read until you puke, like the rest of us" - well said I thought.

I hope this information helps you and wish you the best of luck.

Regards.

Dale.