I'm stuck

Alright, I am hoping somebody in one of these forums might be able to help. I am posting this in all of the Xbox forums as no forum seems to be the perfect match.

I followed bad softmod instuctions. At first the result was an error 21 and losing the option to copy saves from card to HDD and vice versa. All copy functions disappeared. Since then the Xbox has gone further into paperweight status, now it won't boot up - it powers up twice then on the third goes straight to error 21.

I have tried everything to get into the hard drive. xplorer360 will not recognize the drive, though my computer acknowledges the drive is connected to the computer in bios and such. But every time I try the hot swap it tells me no FATX HDD is connected. The hot swap does not work.

At this point I wonder whether the HDD has gotten damaged from MANY attempts to hot swap (getting rattled around and such.

So I have done all the research. I actually have a new HDD waiting for it too. But it seems that darn eeprom is the problem to formatting a new HDD.

So as people will be tempted to tell me look in this thread... I have. I looked at the eeprom reader thread and it will not work with my computer, no serial port.

So what in the world do I do? What can I do? It seems as though I have a paperweight at this point. All I was trying to do was turn the thing into a media center and now it's junk. At this point I would pay somebody to help me fix it... that's a better option than buying a used Xbox.