After a bad power surge both my original crystal xbox and the component switcher died a horrible death. This started with the dreaded flashing orange light.

The Symptoms

Orange flashing lights and bad capacitors were the start of this project. It took a while to remove all the capacitors only to find that the CPU was dead shorted. This was the only the first motherboard I had to work on.

Musical motherboard swapping

after reaching out the retro facebook group for parts someone sent me a 1.6 rev board that was unmodded but the case, drive and dvd drive were all bad which was a great donor for my machine. Little did I know that the case of the crystal 1.4 and the donor 1.6 were slightly different. I had to cut a couple of plastic standoffs to get it to fit.

Thankfully, the board worked with one downside, the 2tb drive I had in the console with all my games on it was locked to the other machine.

Remodding the console

Once I got the motherboard booting then next step was to unlock the HDD and re-lock it to the new one. I opted to use FatXplorer64 to do this with a HDD caddy.

I readded the Aladdin mod chip to the new mod chip but also ended up running the MechAssault Rocky5 hack to repatch the HDD with a new dashboard as it seemed to have gotten corrupted in the whole process of it dying. Something to remember, there are different versions of these discs and not all of them work, you need to check the number on the edge of the disc to make sure they match, not just the game case as I learnt.