Before i start, i appologise beforehand for the lack of knowledge in XBOX as this is the first time i have had a console to repair (or even used one) My mate brought me an xbox with the xecuter 3 chip installed. he said it wasnt loading the "dashboard" and wasnt playing any games that u put in, and he wants it softmodded instead. there was another hdd in there (unlocked). the box was booting up but it kept freezing whenever u tried to play a game. when u put an original game in, it just done "nothing", the CD icon would appear and it would just get stuck. I opened it up and removed the eprom (24c02N) and read it. It seemed to read only once, and then my computer decided it did not want to read it anymore... (whups), so i got the keys from the dump (using that live beta program), but i presumed the chip is fried as my reader refused to read it again. I looked around and found a 24lc32, so i put it in my writer and wrote back the information.. all was good. soldered it back into the box, now the box doesnt boot. it comes on with the red light solid, nothing on the screen. even when i put the original chip back in, it gives me a red flashing light on the eject button. question is, is this error related to the eprom? will only the same eprom work (atmel 248 24c02n) ? where can i get a blank chip from? i have found many places selling the DIL but not the so8.
That sounds like a common total hardware failure scenario. The dvd drive packs up, followed by the IDE controller.. people start screwing about with config magic and corrupt the eeprom. It doesn't show with the chip enabled, and then they take the chip out, in the misguided belief that it is somehow the chip that is causing the dvd no read problem, and a softmod will cure it.... The data you got from the eeprom was probably corrupt in the first place, as the box should still boot even without an eeprom with the xecuter3 enabled. It sounds like it will be uneconomic to fix, and a chip is always a better bet than a softmod (which you would never boot because of the need to lock the drive to the (corrupt) eeprom data. Whatever you have written to that eeprom isn't the right stuff.. you need a full eeprom.bin file.. the "key" you extracted with live info is only part of the story, and that's probably why your board will no longer boot as most i2c devices are pretty much interchangable.. the main differences are in the read/write enable.. some are write once, others are write-many. Sounds like you did a "destructive_dump" on yours. (read while shuffling up with 00, same as a psx bios dump) Check the eeprom reader guide by unicron for much more info about eeproms. This board should still boot with the xecuter3 enabled anyway, unless the soldering is messed up.. or it is on one of those hateful solderless pogo pin POS things. I would start trying to fix this by replacing the xecuter, and getting power to it.. It should have a blue light on when it is enabled. Once that is up you will probably get a display on the screen.. I seem to remember that iof you hold the white button on the controller it boots to the xecuter setup screen instead of dash.. There is often an eeprom.bin file stored in the chip memory, but as I have never needed to look for it I can't for the life of me remember where it is... The xecuter makes the onboard eeprom redundant, so get that going first. You can source a suitable i2cxxxxx eeprom off an old stick of ram, or a hdd, or a cd-rom board.. they are pretty standard, and most pc hardware uses them or close relatives .
Thanks for your reply varnull. I dont know if you noticed, the first thing i done was remove the xecuter3 chip, so its no longer on the board. i am 100% sure the image that i wrote to the 24lc32 chip is the same as the one from the original chip, if i dump the image from this replacement chip again and read it in with live info, it will read the same info. I read the eprom.bin file with live info and have a complete dump of the original chip. As far as i have seen the red flashing ring is supposed to indicate eprom failure? maybe the xbox reads the chip in a different way and the difference between the 24c02 and 24lc32 are causing this problem?
Right and what he said was, removing the chip was the wrong thing to do. A chip forgives a lot of problems, your eeprom could have been corrupt in the first place as Varnull said, hench the chip installed, removing the chip, confounded you're problem. Put the chip in and then start from the premise that it is good, does it load the dash?, Do you get error codes, does the dvd load games, do you get errors. The chip fixes the motherboard issues, bad or fried eeprom. You have other issues that the chip can't fix. You might need another console, or maybe just another DVDrom. WHy do people assume when they can't play off the drive that it's the motherboards(eeprom) fault, maybe the drive is bad, or the ide is bad
Hi and thanks for your replies. My original question asked whether I could replace the 24C02N in the xbox with a copy of it in a 24LC32. The answer was no. I got a blank 24C02 Atmel 248 and wrote the image that i had sucessfully downloaded from the original chip and it worked. So if you do fry your eprom, you cant just use "any chip". DLyon4, thank you for your reply, but if you read my post properly, i mentioned that I took out the eprom to read the original drive lock password because the drive attached was unlocked (as it was being used by the xecuter3 chip - which was no longer there); and i didnt "assume the eprom was faulty". Thanks for your reply though.
Hi, not that it matters a lot as you solved the issue, but as far as I remember, the small (256 bytes) devices use one byte in the IIC protocol for the adressing. The larger devices (24LC32 = 4KB) use 2 bytes. That's probably why they aren't compatible. regards.
