Hacking Xbox 360 DVD reflash?

[sethcathison]

I have an old style XBox 360 Elite, manufacture date of Jun 2007
It also has a Liteon DVD Drive

now my DVD drive was flashed , i think, in 2009. Then about 4 weeks after i got the drive flashed i got banned from Xbox Live! I used to burn isos and just pay games offline and that worked for a while.
I updated the dashboard a while later to dashboard version 2.0.12416.0 but havn't really played the xbox since then.

Now i want to start playing it again, do i have to get the drive reflashed? im not sure if the newest games will work with my flashed DVD drive, does it need reflashed. I dont know what version of software was put on the drive when it was done in 2009, it was done by someone i have lost contact with. Is there a way i can tell?

From what i gave read, because i have a liteon drive i need a Probe 3 so i wouldnt be able to do this myself but i could pay DinohScene to do it.

Also, do i need to buy one of these Liteon iHAS drives to burn discs?

 

[FAST6191]

If you plan to play newer games on newer dashboards then yes you will need to reflash. MS also issued a DVD update (the first and only one for original xboxes) along the way hence the.

Assuming the old games were burned using splitvid (was the standard for a year before the introduction of LT and available and reasonably common for a lot longer) then they will work as long as they are not among the AP2.5 six (Fable III, Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit, Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, Halo: Reach, Call of Duty: Black Ops and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2). Said six will need to be reburned after a patch or two and used on an updated firmware.

You only need the ihas drives or an equivalent (there was a software method for some models) for the XGD3 discs, though they are not always used at this point they are almost certainly used for any "big" game. Still fire some shots into http://www.abgx.net/filename/?ch=6 and it will hopefully tell you what goes with the games you are interested in.

2009 was the year of upheaval. If it was before the banwave then chances are it was September or October you had it done. This was before LT as well so you might even be able to dump your keys without the aid of any special hardware. Indeed it is before 1.6NS so you might have trouble with some games made long before now.
Ways to check... no surefire ones without hardware/pulling it apart. If it is before 1.6NS (late December 2009) then chances are the newer games will not work without the activate.iso disc. The last game to be released before the update was the scene release of Deus Ex in August 2011 (Deus.Ex.Human.Revolution.XBOX360-COMPLEX) so any game before then (make it early 2011, Portal 2 if you are looking for a suggestion but there are many good ones).
LT will load it straight up but 1.6 will not without you first sticking a disc in the drive with activate.iso burned to it.

2.0.12416.0 was not a public release (I have not got a beta list in front of me but that is a very odd number). Did you try it to allow some newer games but still access Fable or something? Some people around the time noted the release was new enough to fool newer games into working (if you removed the updates) but left of AP2.5 enough to have Fable 3 still work.

As you are rocking a banned xbox then you might also wish to know that we got a new hack at the same level as JTAG (USB loading, XBLA, DLC, LAN games over the internet, homebrew, hard drive loading, any size hard drive.....) and you are on an early enough dash to have the easier route in. Alas it is not "trip to maplins" territory like JTAG but not all that troublesome to get into (have not checked prices in a while but somewhat less than a new game or maybe new game territory). Bonus 2 is though you are probably not troubled by it because you have USB/hard drive loading if you do it but it will allow you to dump your DVD key.

 

[sethcathison]

going back through my emails i noticed that it was flashed in September 2009 so i was banned in Oct 2009. i think there was a big wave of bannings then
I just had a look through my folder of burned discs and saw a disc i burned called Activate Boot Disc so i guess i used that at some point. One of the last games i got working was ALan Wake.
I would like to play the latest games so i guess i would need a reflash.

Is this new hack the RGH one on DinohScene's Hack Guide? If it involves soldering though im out!

i was reading up on xkey and it says i need a dump of my original dvd firmware. I dont have that and its since it was flashed in 2009 does that mean its gone forever?

 

[DinohScene]

You can redump your DVD key from the drive (provided it's not corrupted by an beta update or whatever you done with it)
If it is corrupted then RGH is the only way.

Personally, I'd get it RGH'd or R-JTAGged.
Since it can't access Live anyway, I see no point in keeping it stock (plus it saves you the hassle of burning games ;p)

Edit: Yes I still flash DVD drives etc.
However, for you, it might be best if you send your entire 360 to me if you're willing (only the console, no AV, no PSU and no HDD)
So I can dump the DVD key, update the console and flash it again.

 

[sethcathison]

how much for RGH and how much for drive flash?

 

[DinohScene]

RGH, (I hope it's a Falcon or higher) is free if you provide the Coolrunner 3 chip.
Otherwise it's chip costs + shipping.

DVD flash is exactly the same, just shipping costs ;]