Into the Void

About 2 years ago I helped a friend mod his Xbox (v1.4) by soldering a mod chip to it. It worked fine until recently when he loaned it out to someone who, for some reason, decided to flip the Xecuter BIOS switches while the console was turned on. We tried getting the mod chip to work again, and even tested all the leads for proper voltage, but no dice… the chip was fried!

So it was time for plan B: software-modding. Since my friend already had a copy of 007:AUF and a memory card with the save-game exploit, it should have been easy. That is, until we booted the Xbox to run 007:AUF and got a “Your Xbox requires service…” error! The problem is that the hard drive was unlocked (from when it was modded before), and the only backup of the key ever made was stored on a Maxtor drive that crashed in 2005. Without the key, we could not boot the Xbox since the stock BIOS must unlock the drive with the key it has stored in its EEPROM. If the drive is already unlocked, then the unlock operation will fail. What this meant is that the only way around the problem would be to extract the key from the EEPROM, which by the way would be encrypted.

So we search Google and find an article (click here to read) that explains how to build an EEPROM reader that allows you to dump the contents of the EEPROM to a PC. The EEPROM reader consists of a hardware interface (an I²C->DB9 adaptor) that you must build and a freeware application called PonyProg2000 that will actually read in the contents. I got all the parts I needed from Radio Shack for about $13 and built the adaptor (shown below)…

Since the Xbox could power up fine, I did not need to use an external power supply. I connected the adaptor, ran PonyProg2000, and it dumped the contents without a problem. Cool! I then used a program called LiveInfo (thanks Yoshihiro) to decode the EEPROM contents and get the HDD key. All in all it was a great deal… for $13 and a few hours of work my friend can once again use his Xbox for, you know… emulating the NES and N64, watching XviD movies, running Linux, and sharing files. Who knows?… one of these days he might even use it to play an Xbox game!