As part of an absolute jackpot of a score, I happened to show up at the local refuse station shop just as they put out all of the old Xboxes and Playstation 2’s and managed to talk the guy down to $50 if I took the whole lot. I ended up with 5 Original xboxes, 6 Playstation 2’s and whole bunch of controllers.
Assessment and Repair
Out of the 5 xboxes I had (two that came from my friend and uncle), 3 of them just needed new belts for the DVD’s drives and a bit of cleaning and new heat sink paste on the CPU/GPU. Two of them turned out to be mod chipped and working for the most part. I sent on of them mod chipped ones to my dad and kept the other. I ordered some parts from AliExpress for the DVD drives got to work.
You can actually replace the DVD drive belts from the outside of the unit, just pop the drive open with a paper clip through the little hole, and the some small tweezers can reach in and pop off the belt. This trick works for xbox 360’s as well.
The one I got from my friend was in a bit of dis-repair. It was not booting at all with a suspected bad hard drive. On closer inspection, a lot of the chassis was rusty, a wire was loose for the mod chip and indeed the hard drive was going bad. I ended up going through this one and removing a whole lot of capacitors as well as you can see they were extremely leaky, luckily for me they hadn’t had time to eat the board. The exceptionally bad one behind the CPU by the fan actually made the thing lock up after a 10mins of being powered on.
Once I had done most of the repairs I ended up upgrading the hard drive with a larger “brand new” 300gb Seagate IDE drive. I actually purchased two “New sold stock” drives from Trademe with the intention of putting them in my PS2 fat and OG Xbox but for what ever reason, after trying to install this 300gb drive in this xbox I had nothing but issues and decided to bite the bullet and do the 1TB SATA to IDE conversion and load it with as many games as possible. I ended up getting a known compatible adapter from Trademe
here. My version also came with the 80pin cable as well. Once I had installed this setup, this is where I ran into my next issue, finding a suitable softmod kit for it. Originally this xbox was loaded from Auto Installer Deluxe, which I tried to find versions of it ( pm me if you want the links to them images ), but I ended up going for the
Rocky5 modding method in the end as it was the most up to date way to softmod an xbox.
After about 8 tries of trying to get this to work between fixing more capacitors I finally got a stable unit and began loading games. The full library is about 900GB compressed. You need to extract the game out and then copy over all the game folders via FTP to the XBOX. Make sure you have good networking and allocate a full day to this part. I opted not to setup XBMC Kodi or any emulators as I have plenty of other better systems for those things. Something that I am still to add to this is a better quieter fan and wireless controllers, when I can find some that work.
Materials/Parts
0 Comments