X-Box whoas......

May 10, 2005 9 Replies

Someone brought in an X-Box for repair.



When powered up, The fan runs, I can hear the HD whirl, but there's no video.



The "drawer" open/close button flashes green but stays red the rest of the time. It does open and close the door and I can hear a disc spin when I put one in there.



I checked the 3 chokes on the PCB at the video connector, and an on board micro fuse, they are okay. Any advice ?



Rick



Probably the best bet is to buy a unit off ebay with something else wrong with it, beyond the power supply and replacing the DVD drive there's not a whole lot you can do. With a mod chip you can replace the hard drive too but that doesn't sound like the problem here.

There is not much you can service, other than changing parts until you find the right one. From what I have read, most of the time, it is the drives that fail in these units. The X-Box is very preparatory.

--

JANA _____

When powered up, The fan runs, I can hear the HD whirl, but there's no video.

The "drawer" open/close button flashes green but stays red the rest of the time. It does open and close the door and I can hear a disc spin when I put one in there.

I checked the 3 chokes on the PCB at the video connector, and an on board micro fuse, they are okay. Any advice ?

Rick

Thanks for the advice folks, I thought this was a losing battle,

Rick

I've come across those symptoms on 2 occasions : First was modded, turned out to be a crappy d0 solder. The second was unmodded, and it turned out the owner had somehow contrived to wipe the flash. HTH

You may wish to take this up with people on xbox-scene.com forum, there are people there that have seen everything/anything that could possibly go wrong, and may give you some helpful details. However, judging from your description, I think you might just have to dig up another motherboard from ebay (probably sets you back about $30). Just note that if it doesn't come with a hard drive (or if your current drive is locked), you'll need to scrape up another hard drive of at least 8GB and the appropriate modchip to allow you to boot with an unlocked hard drive (assuming the system is still unmodded).

**Perhaps it's one of those evil Thomson DVD drives that has ravaged earlier versions of the Xbox. You can tell which drive it is by going here:

formatting link

Apparently, you can now buy drives that you can just trade with the defunct one with no modding or flashing. I happen to own one of the Thomson-plagued Xboxes, it makes for a pretty doorstop ;)

kaboomie

Nah, if the DVD drive fails the box will still boot up to the dashboard from the hard drive.

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