managed to repair a first generation xbox360

[nickfil]

No questions on tech stuff this time, just super excited that i managed to do this.

A buddy of mine was having the "unplayable disc" error on his xbox so he gave it to me. I managed to take the thing apart after ordering a tool to do it. When i fired it up, i noticed that the disc wasn't spinning, so i disassembled the cd tray and lubed up the spindle and just to be safe, the rails on the laser too. That gave the xbox about another 3 or 4 months of life, but i was avoiding the real problem. The laser had worn out.

So i ordered a new laser online after figuring out what kind of cd drive i had. I would've ordered a new cd drive, but apparently the motherboard of the drive has a unique serial code that the motherboard looks for when it fires up, so that was out of the question. The laser sat there for a few months. Probably like 4.

The reason was i had never soldered anything before, and to activate the laser i had to desolder a ball of solder off the super tiny board. I kind of muddled my way through it... thought it was fine- plugged it all in and assembled again only to find that i hadn't gotten enough of the solder. Second time was a charm! Now the thing is running like a tank!

And you know- since it was appart.... I actually ordered a new case.



The same friend's parents run a metals/jewelery shop so he got the top of it laser etched with some mass effect art. I want to add some blue paint to the etching to make it pop more off the gray. The way it is now is kind of hard to see. Still- super excited about it.

Maybe now i'll get the balls to install that mod chip for the saturn i got from racket like 8 months ago!

[equalsign]

Cool points for you . Awesome job.

[corn619]

The Saturn modchip is very simple to install. Soldering the wire on the leg is a little nerve racking I have to admit.

[nickfil]

The Saturn modchip is very simple to install. Soldering the wire on the leg is a little nerve racking I have to admit.

The saturn is for sure my next project. Like you said- pretty easy to install. Eventually i want to try to follow some ben heck tutorials. Thats the goal.

[skate323k137]

my buddy got a 360 with a broken laser, and at first we thought we'd have to rip his firmware and flash the new drive. well, 2 uncooperative sata cards later, i thought, "there has to be a better way". and there was. All i did was swap the mobo's of the DVD drives. no soldering necessary, put his mainboard into the new working drive, and all was good. funny enough there were no tutorials or anything on this on the internet untill about 2 weeks after I figured that this would work.

note that he had already obtained a whole new drive, before calling me to be informed that he couldn't just swap them out.

[nickfil]

"there has to be a better way"

oh. my. god. I went through a couple pain in the asses to get the console where it is. Never thought to do this. It would've been so much easier. And i even did the SAME EXACT THING to recover a hard drive a month ago!

oh well- lesson learned i guess.