Need Help! trouble after DVD drive swap

[chrisnuzzo76]

I did an x clamp repair on my friends 2005 360, and also swapped in a newer dvd drive, while not realizing that you have to use the same model drive as well as swap out the internal board because of the encoding in it.

After trying the newer drive and it only playing dvd's and not games, I put the original drive back in, and now it acts as if there is no drive at all.

The 360 has a constant flashing green power button light and the eject button's do not work (both the physical and the on screen one).

What can I do to get either DVD drive to work?

[Blackaddr]

You don't need to replace a broken drive with the same model but you DO need to spoof the new drive (flash it's firmware) with the proper keys and signature from the original.

As for why the original doesn't work now, sounds like you may have accidentlaly plugged in the drive power cable backwards in which case you shorted and fried the drive.

If it was plugged in backwards, you'll need someone experienced in repairing fried drives to take a look at it.  At the very least, you need someone to retrieve the firmware from the original drive to obtain the DVD key, etc.

I'm assuming the console isn't hacked so you can't retrieve the DVD key from the console's keyvault.  Without that DVD key, you can't replace the drive.

[chrisnuzzo76]

You are probably right about plugging it in backwards.

I'm guessing I wouldn't be able to put the card from the old drive into my newer one and use it because they are of different models?

Or can I get another drive of the same model as the original, and swap out the board with the ribbon cables on it?

For now I'm going to look into flashing the drives and see what I can do from there for now.

Thanks.

[Blackaddr]

The next step would be to try to read the firmware since at this point you don't know why the drive doesn't work.

If you can't read the firmware, swapping PCBs won't help because the PCB itself has been damaged.  The firmware on the chip, on that PCB contains things like the DVD key which you NEED to replace a drive.  If the PCB did get damaged from a backwards connection, you need to take it to someone who can diagnose it.

I had a friend who plugged the power in backwards but all he did was burn a PCB power trace.  He flywired over the burnt trace and the drive worked just fine after that.  Either way, somebody who knows what to look for needs to try to repair the PCB or find some way to read the firmware off it.