This was a post I made 4 years ago on the OGXbox subreddit. I miss our little community, so hopefully they’ll find this place. I may as well add a little content to try and start things off. So about 4 years ago…

"It all started with me wanting an emulator and realising my old xbox was just gathering dust anyways. So it began.

Figured out my xbox version, already had splinter cell, got a usb to controller port adapter, set my well studied plan into action. It was all supposed to be relatively painless. That was 6 months ago…what a fool I was.

I soldered my points in preperation for a TSOP flash as that was my endgame mod. Ready to go, I went ahead and soft modded. Now I should haved nulled my eeprom, but at the time I didn’t realize it would null the motherboard as well and not just the HDD, so I instead went to save my eeprom file safely away. It was probably lucky that I chose that route (I guess) because as I tried to solve network errors and get my eeprom file saved to my pc, it happened; my worst fear…the system froze, I restarted and nothing was working. My fucking HDD failed. So I guess lucky it didn’t fail midway, trying to null the eeprom, but it failed and my eeprom file was lost. Fuck me, right?

But I’m determined now. I figure out how to make an eeprom reader…my soldering skills have now gone from never having done it before, to making hardware to read the eeprom off my motherboard. I can’t lie, I really impressed myself when I actually recovered the file. So now to rebuild an HDD.

But I can’t get an IDE HDD that doesn’t come dead on arrival. I probably ordered and returned 5 of them before looking up a lockable SATA. So my new HDD finally writes properly, I have a SATA to IDE converter(?), new IDE cable, ready to try again. At this point, you’re probably thinking, “why not just use a mod chip and be done with it?”. I’ll tell you why; pride. I didn’t want a mod chip, I had a 1.0 version with a perfectly rewritable TSOP already, and damnit, I was gonna rewrite that removed if it killed me.

Ready to try again, I start it up with more hope than I should’ve allowed myself. And what do I see on the screen now? Error 11. Now I feel defeated. Is it the new IDE cable? The converter? Am I so unlucky that my disc drive has now spontaneously failed too? I try switching cables, putting the old HDD back in just to see if I can get an error 7 again, but now it’s just 11 over and over again. I give up.

Fastforward to last week, my friend gave me his old xbox to try again. It’s a version 1.0 as well, but I go in with shielded hopes. I solder my points, softmod, null the eeprom this time (just in case, cause I don’t have a working desktop for my eeprom reader anymore), and boot my Hexen disc. Go to flash the TSOP…and it works! Praise the gods, it works!

Now I can have more fun: -build a new HDD (that doesn’t have to be locked, you piece of shit failing HDD that started all of my problems!) -Reset my friends HDD to factory with my first xbox eeprom file and try to flash that one as well or at least diagnose what has failed me -Enjoy at least one xbox that is safe from HDD/disc drive failures and start exploring all the new possibilities.

TL;DR - Lost my eeprom file while trying to mod, which set forth an adventure of despair and hoplessness, before finally succeeding.

Special thanks to the community for teaching me everything I know! Y’all are amazing"