Fun times with an xbox

May 18, 2011 at 5:21am
So I obtained an xbox 360 slim (4gb) a couple of weeks back and was looking for some good indie games to play. Well as I was well aware 4gb of storage would not hold up to the mass amount of exploring I planned on doing for long. So I decided to begin looking into hard drive upgrades. First thing I did was look for where it would be installed, and when I found it I was surprised to see that their hard drives are connected and powered via standard SATA connections. I'm sure this is old news for most console gamers but I hadn't heard yet.

So, like any good little code monkey equipped with basic knowledge of standard PC hardware I quickly wired a switch to jump start a spare power supply that would be used to power several case fans and the 2TB hard drive I planned on hooking up to my xbox. Before actually going to newegg to order a cheap hdd of specified quality I realized that microsoft HAD to have put some security in place specifically for this kind of thing. I had read several times about alternative xbox 360 firmware that was pretty successful and quite stable, but I never actually had any experience with it (nor have I done much research)

My question is: has any one here had any experience with xbox 360 modding/hacking or used the 'homebrew dashboard' alt firmware? (I think that's what it was called) if so, do you think this is worth it? I'm aware it will void my warranty but that doesn't bother me much.
May 18, 2011 at 10:03pm
I think it also bans you from Xbox live when you mod the console. I could be wrong though. Why not just clone the 4GB drive over to a larger HDD?
May 18, 2011 at 10:07pm
closed account (3hM2Nwbp)
Wait, I'm confused...your X-Box 360 lasted long enough to think about modding it? I thought that the red rings were guaranteed within 24 hours. :P

*I got lucky with mine, I had it a month before it died.
Last edited on May 18, 2011 at 10:07pm
May 18, 2011 at 10:09pm
I've gone through about four of them I think :p. Then again I bought two first gen's
May 18, 2011 at 10:13pm
closed account (3hM2Nwbp)
The second one they sent me didn't get the rings, instead it just froze every 10 minutes or so. I tried to give it the rings, but got the hair drier too close and melted part of the chassis. Guess that's it for my xbox gaming career :P
May 18, 2011 at 10:13pm
I must've been quite lucky then. I had a first generation 360 that lasted a year at least, probably more than two.

Edit: Just wanted to note the past tense. It did RRoD on me.
Last edited on May 18, 2011 at 10:14pm
May 18, 2011 at 10:22pm
@Seraphimsan
My buds dad is some sort of electronic engineer and was modding his xbox 360 to allow burned disks to be able to run on it. I'll see if I can dig up any information about it for you.

Luc Lieber said:
I thought that the red rings were guaranteed within 24 hours.

Lol! I've heard a lot of reviews about xbox's getting red rings incredibly fast. Maybe i'm just lucky, but I've had mine for almost two years now and haven't had a single problem with it.
May 18, 2011 at 10:26pm
Speaking of RRoD, did anyone run into that issue with the XBox origionals with the (Foxconn?) boards for the PSU? I loved how easy that was to fix.
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