xbox soft modded hdd dashboard deleted and unable to unlock hdd to repair

Hello All,

This is a tough one so bear with. I have two xboxs I am trying to fix, my boss chose me since I have a extensive pc/mac/linux background. To put it simply, his son softmodded both of these xboxs and through the act of ftping it, I would have to assume he deleted the dashboard files at minimum. I have focused on one of them since it is the worst one, but the problems are obvious.

Originally the box upon boot showed an error 16. What I researched found this was a clock issue, it is true, this unit has been unplugged for some time. This unit has never been hard modded, I was the first one to crack the case, so it is the retail hdd and bios.

This box must of had the dashboard deleted since there is no way to boot it, even from a evox boot disc, it simply would not read it.

My next assumption was to get my hands dirty and work on the hard drive itself to at least restore the dashboard files. After some extensive work and playing around, I ended up using xboxhdm and mhdd to atempt to unlock the drive, since this became the new obstacle. After nearly 14 hours of work trying to unlock the drive, I gave up. I was able to pull an HD key from the drive by using a blank eeprom.bin file I found through xbins, then took that key and put it into hashcalc and the passwords it generated and attempted to put into mhdd work neither.

I also tried the stock passwords like seagate plus 25 spaces, xboxscene and teamassembly, but thos would not work since The drive was never unlocked before, meaning the drive could not have had a changed password.

I may be leaving a few things out so please ask as I am out of answers on the solution.


My assumption now is the only way to fix the problem on this unit is either a)somehow unlock the hard drive with a piece of software I have not found anywhere (I have tried all of the hddunlock, unlockhd, hd key softwares) or b)purchase a mod chip and install to allow the unit to at least bypass the clock issue and then possibly purchase a stock hard drive and use that unlocked after doing a rebuild from xboxhdm.

A minor note, I even tried using a stock hard drive I have and did a rebuild to it after formatting it on my mac into msdos. When I plugged that into the xbox, I got an error 5, which is the hd is not locked error, since I am not using a mod chip which bypasses the lock/unlock issue.

To say the least, I feel I have exhausted all possibilities since I dont think it is going to be possible to get the hd unlocked (I do not have the original eeprom since it was saved, but someone deleted it, mostly my boss's son).

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated, since I am somewhat new to this all, I feel I have given it a really hard look and feel I have consumed a lot of the technology. I will ask later about the other unit, it seems simpler but at this point, I am pooped.

Thank you all for your feedback and help!
Tim

 

Wow, big day huh champ?

Your issue is actully much more simple then what you attempted. Research "Hotswap". It allows the drive to be unlocked and locked by the Xbox itself!

For Error 16, unplug the DVD drive and let the Xbox go to an Error 12 screen, then do the hotswap! Once your in, replace all the dashboard files and relock the drive.

 

Ok. Things are looking up so far. I was able to hotswap (had to use a different method, some say try hotswapping during bios, I had for some reason to hotswap during linux boot manager for to work) and access the hard drive unlocked.

I have a rar file I got from yahoo, type msdash.rar at yahoo, second link, direct download. I put that in the c drive of my xboxhdm folder, did both a restore and a rebuild and still got the error 16.

I figured I would for the heck of try this, but I am sure it is all wrong. Logged into xbins, got evox, changed the evodash to xboxdash.xbe (becuase xboxhdm only recognizes that, not default) and did a rebuild with evox files, still get error 16. I thought maybe the moded dashboard might work but I assumed that it is not designed to implemented this way.

I am assuming at this point that the msdash I have gotten is not correct, missing something or something else is majorly wrong here. I can pretty much do anything to the hard drive now that it is unlocked so if anyone can throw me a bone and let me know if there is something else I can try would be sweet, cause if I can get both of these xboxs running, I get one for free.

Thank you again in advance!
Tim

 

Use the dash you find in my tutorial, also see what sense you can make of that regarding your situation!

http://forums.llamma.com/viewtopic.php?t=9685

 

yep, after doing some searching on the net for the latest msdash, I got to the link to. Thank you for forwarding it. I downloaded two version of c and one of them also had an e drive too. A note though, I loaded both the e and c the first time, and the xbox continued to reboot after the logo forever. I dumped the e drive and just loaded the c, and I was back in business.

Worked for the second xbox too. My boss is going to be so happy, I get a free xbox and his son gets a spanking for making me go through all this hell.

It took them like 6 months to try and fix it without getting anywhere, with your guys help, it took me four days.

Awesome, thanks again!