TECH

Last week I had a go at flashing the firmware on my XBOX 360. I have built up a decent collection of £40 games and wanted to ensure that I could back them up, and also fancied the challenge of having a go to see if I could do it.

The first thing I did was do a LOT of reading. The machine was still relatively new and could end up being a rather expensive paperweight if I got it wrong.

Most of the reading I did was on http://www.xbox-scene.com there are some very good tutorials and forums to plough through.

The idea is that by flashing the firmware of the DVD drive on the xbox it fools it into thinking that a backup game is in fact an original and the xbox will load it.

After getting an appreciation of all the steps involved I decided to give it a go.

The first thing I did was to order some media, so that I had something to try at the end of it. All games have to be burnt to Dual Layer DVD+R media. I've had a dual layer burner in a machine for some time but never used it due to the comparable expense of dual layer media compared to single layer £1.50 / £0.20. Quite a bit of a difference.

You need to know what type of DVD Drive you have in your xbox as the method to flash the drive will vary. There is a good picture at http://pictures.xbox-scene.com/xbox360/dvd/TS-HLG.jpg to show you the differences in the tray design so you can tell without opening it up.

The outer shell of the xbox 360 is completely screwless and to flash it you need to get inside. To help me get inside I used three sources.

http://forums.xbox-scene.com/index.php?showtopic=514944 - v40 Toshiba-Samsung and Hitachi-LG guides - worth searching the site for an updated version.
http://www.anandtech.com/systems/showdoc.aspx?i=2610&p=2 - A decent description for getting inside
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrSKJZHpIho&mode=related&search= - youtube video of some one opening their xbox.

With those three guides I was able to work through it and its a lot faster doing it a second time. Its just a question of working out which of the air holes to stick the screwdriver through for the side bits. The worst bit is the bit at the back. A lot of the guides show making a key to help with this bit out of a CD Case. I used an old credit card which worked a treat.

Once inside it you have to hook the dvd drive to the PC via a SATA cable. All the guides talk about making sure that the xbox and the pc are grounded. I used a wire to do this between the cases of the two. You have to leave the drive connected to the xbox for power but just unplug the sata cable from the dvd drive and connect it to your pc. The xbox and PC are going to need to be quite close to do this. There seems to be a limited number of supported SATA bios versions that will work. I found that a pc with an onboard VIA chipset that allows you to change between RAID and IDE types worked. There is a recommended PCI card you can get if you’re having problems. I unplugged all other CD / DVD drives to be on the safe side and to save any confusion.

For my xbox I used the autoflasher program that is out there. After reading up a bit more I wish I hadn’t, there has been a few people that have not got on with this program where as the manual method seems to have more success. If I was to do it again I would spend the extra time to do it manually.

The autoflasher program comes with some software to format a USB stick so that its bootable. Once you’ve done that and copied the files over you can boot your PC from the USB stick. The autoflasher gives you a couple of menu options and repeats them for different SATA chipsets. After repeatedly trying the VIA option without success I tried the general chipset option with option 1 of the menu which reads the firmware from the drive. This worked first time.

The next bits got a bit messy with the autoflasher. Option 1 of the autoflasher says it extracts the firmware and patches it. Well I got some text saying it had read the file then it said something about cant patch in dos mode please reboot. After looking at the batch file it looked like I needed to run it in windows. I rebooted into windows and ran option 1 manually with the xbox connected. It failed to read from the drive as it was disconnected but the patch part of it seemed to work. I then connected everything back up and booted off the USB stick again and selected option 2 which was to write the new patched firmware back to the drive.

I checked that I could still boot an original game to make sure I was no worse off, which worked ok. The next bit was to make some backups of my games. I wont go into that here, there are plenty of guides on it. The backups that I made worked great. I started off using an old NEC DVD burner and have switched to a Pioneer 111D which is giving me a lot better success.

With the Hitachi drive the procedure to flash the drive was a lot different. You first have to set the xbox into Mode B. To do this you still have to open the xbox and connect it to the PC but you then boot off a modified linux boot CD. This boot CD is a modified version of Slax and can be found here http://rapidshare.de/files/18684918/live-cd.iso.html Once it gets to the login prompt the xbox will be in Mode b. You can reset your PC but leave the xbox powered up.

This time when windows boots you should be able to see your DVD Drive. I first tried this with a SATA hard disk in the PC and didn’t have much success, luckily I had an ATA disk with XP on so switched drives and tried that. It didn’t look pretty due to all the drivers being messed up as the disk was for another machine but it did the job.

Once at this point it was easier than the Samsung as the Autoflasher.. was the preferred way to flash this drive. Had to download the autoflasher for this type of drive. I used OPA-XTREME-HITACHI-7IN1-V2_1.

Extracted the files to the computer. I made sure that the xbox drive was the only cd / dvd drive in the machine and ran
FLASH21.BAT from the command line. The 4 digit number is a number you make up and is used to make the filename.

This will flash your xbox drive and create a BACKUP directory such as "X21-1571.OPA" and the program will store FIVE firmware files:

---- key.bin ---- DRIVE KEY /// DRIVE KEY
---- was.bin ---- Your drive before FLASH
---- gdrXX.bin ---- The untouch original fw
---- XX_21.bin ---- The patched Xtreme21 fw
---- now.bin ---- Your drive after FLASH!

XX in the above names will be the version of your Hitachi