Yes, its 2010, the year where I hopefully spent more time on the projects, I am writing about here in my blog. No real progress with Lincade development, but its on my todo, to finalise the changes to the image and release one with SATA and updated Kernel.

Recently I spend some time for my hobby, with modding my XBOX 360. Right now I am owning two XBOX 360. The first box (XENON model) I have bought here in Kuala Lumpur, came already with modified DVD drive. But the drive gave me some headache. Often the games stopped, due to reading errors. Later, the DVD tray refused to open after reading problems. After punching the 360, turning it off and on, I was able to remove the DVD. Sometimes it took me 15 minutes, to get the tray open. So I decided (the box was now already 2 years old), to open the box and update the firmwar and/or calibrate the laser. I found out, that the SATA plug was somewhat broken of the drive. The plastic brdige in the middle of the SATA plug, was lose. Maybe that causes the problem? Any tries with super glue failed. I calibrated the laser and it was better, but the problem returned. I was desperate and thought I should try a firmware upgrade. That Samsung ms-28 should be easy to update, but I struggled with even reading the flash. Probably because of the broken SATA plug. At one point, I must have bricked it. The drive was dead, the DVD key lost. It was not me who flashed it in the first place. So I had no copy of the original ROM. The dashboard Version was to new, the known King Kong exploit didn't work. I bought a RROD box with a working Hitachi. But with wrong DVD key, I was unable to play any game. That's why I decided in March 2009, to buy a new XBOX 360 (JASPER) with HDMI. But kept the old one, hoping one day I would be able to fix it.
Then, I think in December 2009, I read at hack-a-day, the 360 was hacked already 2 months ago. There was the "JTAG Hack" descrided, as a way to flash XELL into the flash of the box and make it boot e.g. Linux. When XELL starts, it displays the CPU Key on the screen. With the CPU key I would be able to extract the DVD key from a dump of my 360 flash memory. The Jtack Hack gives you full read/write access to the nand flash. Certain tools help, to get what I want.
So after sacrifying an old printer cable and soldering the wires into the old XENON, I was able to dump the nand and flash it with XELL. To get the DVD key was now a piece of cake. The next challenge was, to make the Hitachi work. I need to re-flash it with up-to-date firmware, change the DVD key and spoof a Samsung. Well, I never flashed a 360 drive before. A lot of things you need to know. Different drive versions and different procedures, depending on the state of the drive (flashed/unflashed). Here "Jungleflasher" was of big help. The tool itself is great, but even greater is the PDF document which works like an expert system, you can download there as well. In the PDF are links and it will guide you depending on many criterias through the right way, for your drive type/version, state and even helps you to solve Windows related issues if you can't access/flash the drive.
After flashing the drive, I had to get the 360 back into the state, where it starts with a dashboard, instead of XELL loader. At that time, XBREBOOT just became available. With XBREBOOT you can run unsigned code (homebrew) and its a patched dashboard. So I flashed it and what I've got is a 360, homebrew enabled with spoofed and working Hitachi drive. Its back to life! A sweet success after all that hassle and work on it!