RGH Falcon - Splash then E79

[Haygar]

Hi there,

Info first:

cb 5771
cd 8453
cf/cg 13604
ldv 4

I'm stumped with a falcon that consistently throws E79 after about 2secs of the splash screen at boot up. Xell has been no problem and it will boot within 5 secs almost everytime to either that or crashes if trying to boot to dash. On a side note xell is black and white but from what's been posted around that may not be a problem.
I'm using an Xecuter coolrunner and if I disable it and flash my stock image back on there's no problem. Matching images were read, also.

I've tried building my image with several pre packaged tools and ggbuild on it's own so I can't see an issue there. I read that it was advisable to flash the hacked image on through xell so that's what I've been trying, too.
Others seem to be having trouble with either the glitching process, general programming issues, bad image reads or hardware installs but this seems different.
I haven't been able to find the same problem posted elsewhere.

Thanks in advance.

Edit: And you'll shoot me down for not including this first - When I use xell to flash any image back on (stock or hacked) it says 'block 0x270 seems bad status 0x00000208' or thereabouts. But 360 flash tool shows no bad blocks and the stock image runs fine. If I read the image back after writing it's perfect too, so idk.

I have stock images from other rrod falcons here too but they're 7371 so I'm not sure if they could be used. tho I doubt that's the issue.

[Haygar]

just incase anyones listening I've now also tried:
-remapping from block 3ff to block 270 on my orig nand
-built new hacked image from that
-reversed what i did in the first step on new image
-no joy

also on the off chance that my nand had developed a bad block while under the knife and assuming that the original nand had no remapping to start with:
-built new hacked image from unmapped orig nand
-remapped block 270 to 3ff
-still no luv

This thing boots the stock nand and glitches in seconds so am I to assume it's still a software issue?

[cory1492]

Here is the problem... 0x208 status indicates a ECC error in that block, possibly something the controller corrected on readback so the block has good data when you feed it to flash tool or ggbuild. Block 0x270 falls inside of xam.xex, and E79 = xam could not load. The block isn't bad yet, but none (well most, I think one of the old linux-on-xbox flashers did it OK) of the tools really handle flashing to blocks with single bit (correctable) errors. You did all the right things, except you ignore the fact that you are still putting the original data to the original block location so your attempt to remap the block fails.

For what seems like the millionth time... flash the original location of the block with a 0x0 filled block after manually remapping it. It's the only way to be sure that soft bad blocks won't be treated as good by the flash controller, or to work around this issue. I outlined the process here just yesterday:
http://www.xboxhacker.org/index.php?topic=17405.msg131177#msg131177

Code:

nandpro.exe dump.bin: -r16 bad270.bin 270 1
nandpro.exe usb: -w16 image_000000.ecc
nandpro.exe usb: -w16 bad270.bin 3FF
nandpro.exe usb: -w16 nullblock.bin 270

For you,  the last step is important. Just make a copy of bad270.bin to nullblock.bin after dumping it and use a hex editor to fill it with 0, and flash that to the machine or the image you are flashing. From then on the block will detect as bad.

[Haygar]

Thank you so much  I have it working perfect but here is my story.

I did what you said and initially it still threw the error but I may have forgotten to power down after.

I think I have a problem with my nand programmer because it seems to be damaging my nand.
After I wrote my ecc image on the first 50 blocks, I booted xell and using xenon.elf to write the new remapped image again rather than manually remapping directly on the nand itself I got:

-block 0x029 seems bad status 0x00000208 (never had that before)
-bad block @ 0x270 status 0x00000250 (was originally status 208)

It was after that write that everything booted fine, both xell and to the dash.

But what concerns me is the failing block at 029
So I guess I should do a  remap so that block 029 > 3FF, 270 > 3FE and nullblock 029 & 270 and reflash using Rawflash.
Then they will be both marked as bad, yeah?