Problem Is there any way to extract the "drive key" from the console instead of the disk drive?

My friend gave me his old 360 Elite, but it's disk drive is missing. I'd like to get a new drive for it, but that's pointless without the drive key or the original drive's circuit board.

If you're wondering where the original drive is, it's somewhere in Germany(I live in the U.S.). The friend that gave me the 360 was in the Army and stationed in Germany. While there, the drive apparently stopped reading his games, so he decided to tear the console open (literally, there's nothing left of the case) and tear the drive apart (again, literally) so he could see what's inside, and once he was done messing(destroying) it, he tossed it in the trash. So, there's absolutely no way I can get the original drive back, but I hate to trash the console since it still works.

 

Someone will be along soon to help if not the link will if you get no better help.
In the meantime if it was a liteon they all got updated a while ago it was an attempt to wipe the dvd flash chip of the firmware hack,so in essence they all have the same key, well that's how i see it.The key may be able to be extracted from the nand if it isn't a liteon? i'm not sure where xell gets the info from i just assume it reads it of the 360 cpu
Thinking aloud i'm wondering why you even need a dvd drive,if its not for xbox live you may as well get an rgh chip installed perhaps that may not be a way round it ?

http://www.realmodscene.com/

 

Where did you get that one from? There was an update that affected the drive a while ago, but it just flashed the drives (not limited to LiteOns) with new firmware, but with the correct key.

Yes, you could get the drive key from the NAND, but that is just a pain in the a.., you basically do a complete RGH just to get the drive key (and you need a NAND dump to create your own XELL for RGH, that's where XELL gets the drive key from). Seeing that you can get a fully working Xbox 360 Phat for under 60 USD and you still need a replacement case and drive for your mainboard that may just be not worth it.

 

Not sure if the reflash is using the key stored in the nand or whether its a completely new updated key by ms,if it was i figured another drive might work without requiring a nand dump.however like you say the jaspers are dirt cheap

 

Not only the Jaspers are dirt cheap, any revision of Xbox 360 phat and even sometimes Xbox 360 slim can be bought dirt cheap nowadays. The spring update reflashed the drive with the same key as before. It also flashed the drive with an original firmware only fitting the specific drive type, which means you could run into problems when you had a spoofed drive, because the update recognized a Samsung drive spoofed as a LiteOn as a LiteOn and tried to flash it with LiteOn firmware, which obviously didn't work. The flashing process stopped after erasing the firmware from the drive, which means if you hadn't stored the key before the Xbox 360 was basically useless.
On one Xbox 360 I used the key stored before to reflash after the update, therefore I know that the keys are still the same. Anything else wouldn't realy make sense, because either MS would have had to add a routine to the update that generated a completely new key during the updating procedure (which means that two or more Xbox 360s could end up using the same keys and could also be a possible security breach, also I don't even know if that would have been possible) or for the update an online connection would have been mandatory so that the update had to call home for a new key, which would have been complicated like hell and again a possible security breach.

 

I see. That's definitely more work then I'm willing to put into it. I guess I'll just use it with Xbox live.
I already have another 360 that works(sorta), but it's nice to know they're so cheap now.
Thank you for the info.