Hardware Common old 360 issues?

[Tom]

I just got a broken 360 from a friend as a "present" and i wanna fix it since i have a ps3 and no xbox, i just fixed a ds (replaced the slot one) so i felt pretty confident in fixing it , only issue is that i dont have a power cable to see whats wrong with it (rrod) he took a hammer to it and the pcb is curved from it but its nothing to bad , i dont really see anything wrong with it , i think i remember him talking a bout a bad cd drive awhile back , is this a common issue? and what are some more common issues too please?

 

[FAST6191]

If you are handy enough with an iron to sort a DS slot then http://www.llamma.com/xbox360/mods/pc_power_supply_xbox_360.htm might be worth a look.

I assume you mean the PSU PCB- if the 360 one is bent then that is not that good.

Problems- RRoD is usually a BGA fault in the GPU either from creep or whiskers. The best fix is a BGA reball but that takes some equipment (bare minimum hot air station with appropriate tip but if you have not done one before then I would head down the IR route and that gets expensive fast*- minimum about the price of a new 360 but better ones are more) but most settle for a reflow (hot air is best but you can remove the fan from the GPU and allow it to heat that way) and board adjustment (all those RROD fix kits do this) to hold the balls better. All this is usually preceded by video errors and glitches.
The CPU can be affected by the same thing and I have seen one or two HANA faults (the chip responsible for converting the video into something useful) fixed in a similar manner.

*if you do fancy yourself an electronics repair type then BGA repair stuff is quite good to be able to do- PS3 yellow light, 360 RROD, many mobile phone errors and beyond.

I have seen a few bad capacitors (usually fairly obvious blown ones either on top or the side but you might also need an ESR meter) but this is rare (compared to the likes of monitors, motherboards and graphics cards that I usually replace caps for).

Hard drive errors- the usual bad sector stuff. If you hack the machine with a glitch chip (or it is old enough with an early enough firmware for a JTAG) then you can use any drive but otherwise you want an official one or hack a certain series of drives (search for "hddhackr").

DVD drives- usually a bad laser, you can try a POT tweak but that is a stopgap measure at best. Option 2 is the rails, gears and such can be dirty and need cleaning.
Your main problem here is drives have their own key onboard so you either need to get it to build a new drive with (again glitch and JTAG can be used to grab keys if you do not have the ability to get it from the drive)- search for jungleflasher tutorial for the basic concept except where you get to flashing the firmware to the drive you point it at the new one instead. You can replace the laser but that is rarely done as it is a pain (aligning a laser by hand is not fun) but you can buy in a complete drive and swap the circuitry over. New option as of recent months is an optical drive emulator or you do a glitch/JTAG hack and ignore the DVD in favour of hard drives (USB or internal)

After this you are looking at network errors (usually after a power surge or lightning strike) and I am not sure if these can be fixed (if nothing else figuring out what got toasted is annoying) but if the rest still works we usually just tell people to suffer it or buy a new one.