Xbox 360 Hacks
It's now possible to hack the Xbox 360 to make it read regular DVD writable discs.
Requirements
- Screwdrivers
- Plastic stick
- S-ATA cable
- Compatible S-ATA controller card or on-board chipset
- DOS boot disk or hard drive
- Windows XP
- Mktflash, KDX and hacked firmwares
- Xbox 360 console near a computer
- or Xecuter power adapter
Drives and firmwares
There are currently two different DVD drives for the Xbox 360. Toshiba-Samsung and Hitachi-LG, both require their own hacked firmware.
The first proof of a hacked firmware was actually for the Hitachi-LG and creditted for the_specialist at xboxhacker.net. But the first publicly available hacked firmware was for the Toshiba-Samsung, the Hitachi-LG firmware was released under a month afterwards. These firmwares was hacked and released by commodore4eva.
You can find the DVD drive model you have by looking at the tray, if there are many holes and cracks it's a Hitachi-LG, else it's a Toshiba-Samsung.
Disassemble
It's quite hard to disassemble the 360, as Microsoft officialy said, there are no screws and it was supposedly no way to open it. But you first have to remove the faceplate, untuck a few tabs, use a plastic stick to untuck the tabs on the back and lift the top case off the console. No need to remove the black screws on the bottom of the machine if you only want to remove the DVD drive.
Dump firmware
In order to flash the hacked firmware, you first have to dump the current firmware. Every single DVD drive has a unique key that is chained together with the rest of the console. You cannot exchange the drive from another console, it will only give you error messages if you try.
To dump the firmware, you have to boot into DOS and use a utility called mtkflash.exe to read the flash chip to a file. You can use a floppy, pendrive or harddrive to do this. That's no covered here.
- Make sure the SATA settings in the BIOS is set to NATIVE/ID and not SATA-Raid
- Plug the SATA into the back of the DVD drive and connect it to the computer SATA connector
- Boot computer into DOS using a floppy, hard drive or pendrive
- Start Xbox 360 with DVD power cable still connected and video cable plugged in, not neccessary to the tv
- Wait 20 seconds for the Xbox 360 to initilize
- Execute this command: mtkflash.exe r /SATA /m orig.bin
- Wait a few moments while it's dumping the firmware
Patch firmware
Once you have dumped the firmware, turn off the Xbox 360, boot into Windows XP and start KDX (KeydriveX) by foros. This application will load your dumped firmware and read the key. Copy this key, open the hacked firmware, and paste the key into the DVD Key field to replace the 00's or FF'. Save the firmware as hacked_orig.bin.
Write firmware
When you've patched your DVD drive key onto the hacked firmware, boot into DOS again and use mtkflash.exe to write the new firmware to the DVD drive firmware chip.
Follow the same procedure as when you dumped the firmware, mentioned above.
- Execute mtkflash.exe w /SATA /m hacked_orig.bin
Backup games
First of all, you have to realise that you need DVD+-R Dual Layer media and a burner that is able to set the so called booktype to DVD-ROM. This is also known as bitsetting. Most NEC and BenQ drives allows you to set the bitsetting for dual layer burns.
There are two ways to create a backup:
* Use a generic PC DVD drive (recommended) * Use the Xbox 360 DVD drive
Generic DVD drive (recommended)
Requirements:
- DVD drive you can disassemble
- Movie DVD disc over 7.5 GB
- wxRipper
- Enough hard drive space
You have to open/disassemble the DVD drive because you are going to swap the movie dvd with a Xbox 360 game disc without ejecting the disc the normal way. The reason this is required is that the TOC, or table of content size, of the movie dvd will exceed size of any Xbox 360 game and we can therefore do a normal straightforward dump of the disc because this bypasses the disc security added by Microsoft. Ejecting the disc would reset the TOC and the accessable TOC of any Xbox 360 game is only a few megabytes.
First extract the SS sectors that will be burned to the second layer of the dual layer disc later on and then the entire content of the disc.
Xbox 360 DVD drive
Requirements:
- TS drive: 0800.bin firmware
- ISOBuster
- DVDProInfo
After you've flashed the drive with the game-backup-firmware, the drive should appear as a normal DVD drive in Windows and you can use ISOBuster to dump the content of the disc through the Xbox 360.
