360 Broken xbox question.

[El Diablo]

I recently came into possession of a couple broken 360s. On one the supposed problem is that the drive is bad because it only reads discs 1/4th of the time, and the other says "the motherboard is dead".

My question is, how difficult is it to switch the disk drives between xboxs? Do they have to be the same exact model and everything, or will one 360 drive work in another one?

 

[Sousanator]

It's the same process as modding a 360 drive. You just need the KeyID (I believe that's what it is called) of the drive you are replacing, then you spoof the new drive with that ID, flashing the drive with the latest custom firmware. Since Microsoft can detect a spoof easily, you'll get flagged, then banned on the next xbox live ban wave, whenever that happens.

The only difficult part would be if it is a newer lite-on which requires extra hardware or soldering to read the IDs.

I've replaced a lite-on with a benq back in the day, so model/type doesn't have to match

 

[Robby]

It's the same process as modding a 360 drive. You just need the KeyID (I believe that's what it is called) of the drive you are replacing, then you spoof the new drive with that ID, flashing the drive with the latest custom firmware. Since Microsoft can detect a spoof easily, you'll get flagged, then banned on the next xbox live ban wave, whenever that happens.

The only difficult part would be if it is a newer lite-on which requires extra hardware or soldering to read the IDs.

I've replaced a lite-on with a benq back in the day, so model/type doesn't have to match

Pretty much it. Read the key from the drive that doesn't read games and save it. Then spoof it to the drive that is attached to the dead motherboard and that's it.
Depending on what drive you have will tell you how difficult it will be, if it's a samsung, hitachi, benq, or liteon 8c then it will be easy. liteon 7c and 9c require extra hardware to extract the key.

 

[Spiros]

It could just be a misaligned laser as well, I got an xbox with the exact same symptoms as you describe, it would only read the disc once in every like 10 tries. I brought it to my friend's house (because I didn't have the power supply for it, he did), he knocked it over by accident, we tried it again and it worked 3/3 times, so I think my problem was the laser wasn't aligned properly and it falling over seemed to fix it. Not that I'm offering that as a solution, just saying maybe it's an easy fix to just fix the disc drive.

 

[El Diablo]

Okay so my brother is home from college now so I was able to have a power cord to mess around with these.

This one is an RRoD with 3 lights, not 4 like I originally posted here. Other than throwing it in an oven and trying to rework everything myself, is there not much hope for this?

The other one turns on, however it doesn't display anything. I have the AV cable in there correctly and everything and the xbox will just power on and just not display anything, I also cannot hear anything.
Edit: After I typed this out and submitted it, I shut the xbox off and turned it on again and it booted up fine. Not only did it boot up fine but it also read a disc and booted into the game fine (this is the 1/4 of the time one I guess). I don't know if this would be a misaligned laser like you said Spiros because the first time I turned it on it would not display anything at all I don't know if the laser would cause that problem, but like I said I don't know much about these. I guess maybe I will knock it around a bit (not hard obviously) and see if I can get it to work consistently.

The last one turns on, boots up fine, but when I put a disc in it just says "reading" and won't actually read or detect the disc.

Does it seem like any of these could be workable again? The last seems like it's the most likely to get working but I don't know anything about xboxes. Any advice on troubleshooting and working out these problems would be appreciated. Thanks.

 

[Sousanator]

If they were in my possession I'd try the penny trick on the first one, and take the drive out of the second one and spoof it for the 3rd one.
Reason being; 1 - normal RROD, can usually be fixed by replacing the heatsinks (done by pennies)
2 - sounds like a loose connection somewhere, and trying to figure out the problem could be more than its worth, but the drive itself seems to be fine
3 - system seems fine, but sounds like the laser is dead on the drive (which can be fixed by replacing the drive such as the working one from #2)

So in the end you should have one working system that can go online (#1) and a modded one that should be for offline only(#3 with #2s drive)

 

[El Diablo]

Well since #2 is working now, I was going to try and swap the drive from the RRoD into the one not reading discs. I have it about half way open right now (thing pissed me off too much and I gave up for now) so I can try looking up this penny thing and trying that first. The only problem is the drive from the RRoD is missing the eject button so I think the easiest solution may just be to not bother with it and take the drive from it.