Another XBOX Repair: Failed Hard drive and seemingly failed DVD

My son noticed a neighbor was throwing away an xbox and shouted to me, "Daddy, he's throwing away an xbox," all the way across the courtyard and in the house I heard him. He's a loud 7 year old ;)

The neighbor said yeah it's broke. It stopped reading some games and then wouldn't start at all. It says to call customer service. He was kind enough to go inside and grab the video/power cables and let me have it, free. My son then followed him to his jeep and asked if he had controllers, because we'll need them once his dad fixes it.

It took more time than it should've -- Probably 8 hours of mucking around total. The first day I messed with it was useless. MechAssault didn't run. I thought an error 16 shouldn't stop that -- so I cleaned the optics on the DVD-ROM. Still no-go. So I move on and tried to run xboxhdm inside of qemu using a USB->IDE adapter with my laptop. Obviously the hdd had bad sectors, but I didn't put 2-and-2 together when I was getting "Read-only filesystem errors" that this was probably due to qemu, and the usual error would've been something in dmesg about bad sectors... ugh. I pulled out an old 40gig disk I had and started on that. But how to lock it?

So that night I borrowed a desktop PC from the junk closet at work, heh, and tried for an hour like that on the original disk. I was hoping eventually the files would be stored in a non-bad area just enough to get it to boot and get the EEPROM contents. Why'd I bother? I don't care to start building circuits, I haven't the tools, just a cheap 15W iron from RadioShack that isn't quite warm enough for most things... Well, I should've just went straight to building that EEPROM reader, cos it makes more sense and ended up taking not so long. Went rather well once I was able to get pins 1+6 from that DB-9 cable from being soldered together... =\

Here is how and here is another with comments. I spent $2.39 I believe at RadioShack, I only had $2.99 to my name. lol. I got a 4pk of 3.9kohm resistors, and the 5.1V zener diodes. Cut a cheaply made serial cable I use for firmware updates to my FTA satellite reciever (Don't worry, I have a better cable to replace it) for the DB-9 connector, and soldered the 2 points to the LPC connector and the rest was just quickly twisted together. The XBOX did not like this contraption. It turned blinking orange and rebooted but somewhere in there I was able to read this EEPROM onto my laptop with a Prolific USB->RS-232 adapter!

Okay, I kept the wires soldered on but disconnected the other ends from the zener/diode circuit just in case it wasn't a full dump. The last half was all FF's.. Didn't look nearly as populated as the example. So the XBOX kept doing the orange blinking LED / reboot deal! OMG I was able to panic. The comment poster on the second link said if it reboots rather than displays an error then you totally screwed something up! I was scared that I accidently overwrote the EEPROM with random shit. Went ahead and pulled the two wires, maybe the extra capacitance or something was messing up the signalling... It worked!

So having no desire to move shit around to get this file onto the desktop somehow, I sent the eeprom.bin to my FTP server, ran xboxhdm again on the borrowed desktop (it does dhcp!) and downloaded that file and locked the 40gig. Success! It didn't boot straight into a dashboard though, I got some other screen... I'm like -- what the hell -- it was MechAssault! Ha. That DVD-ROM does work. Even better :)

I now own 3 XBOX's. The first is softmod 120gig (long long ago), second is just softmod with MechAssault (never opened!!!), and this one which'll hold a few games on the disk, which is great since the kids scratch the DVD's very often and they left that 120gig one at grandma's during summer vacation -- 500 miles away. :(

Now populating the hdd is another story. Got excellent signal, but like 150KB/s transfer (across wifi), so ... UnleashX never seemed to be fast at FTP for me. Oh well.

Samsung YP-U2J and Windows 2000

This mp3 player is old. Dunno where it surfaced from, but I got it. Doesn't work in 2000 because it uses MTP mode rather than register as a USB Storage Device. You can replace the firmware. After enough googling to realize the better way is to get a USB firmware, vs trying to get MTP to work (screw all that, Windows Media Player 9 is a waste of space too), I found this:

http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/Talk:PortablePlayersSamsungYepp

15 Feburary 2007 post is the firmware I loaded. K, enjoy your extra drive letter! :)

Portable Google Chrome and Windows 2000

Already people making it portable. I guess they all use the nightly builds, which I haven't gotten to work on 2000. I thought the OS at work wasn't gonna run this at all but I took my installed Chrome from home, zipped it up, emailed it to work, and voila. The beta release, build 1583, does work at work! Here it is --

chrome1583.zip

Google Chrome on Windows 2000 / Asus Eee PC

Japanese people are amazingly smart. I was able to change my user-agent as one blog suggested to download the Google Chrome setup, but it wouldn't run... So I downloaded the files in a zip. It warned about Windows 2000 not being supported, started like it was going to do something and had one of them fatal errors. Why bother trying the next approach then...? Because I tried the browser and like it. It is faster, and any gain in speed on an EeePC is much apprechiated!

* Original blog in Japanese
* Google Translation of said blog.
* Local copy: chrome2k.zip

Download the chrome2k.zip file. I didn't run the bat, because I was already able to grab the chrome setup file with the user-agent changed in Firefox, but this is what it does:

copy "%PROGRAMFILES%\Internet Explorer\IEXPLORE.exe" "%PROGRAMFILES%\Internet Explorer\IEXP.exe"
regedit /s chrome2k.reg
"%PROGRAMFILES%\Internet Explorer\IEXP.exe" http://www.google.co.jp/chrome

That .reg that comes with it changes a registry value (ApplicationGoo) which comes up with very little information on Google. It has to do with Application Compatibility, and from the poorly translated site, it basically just makes the following applications think they're being ran under XP: IEXP.EXE, ChromeSetup.exe, chrome_installer.exe, GoogleUpdate.exe, setup.exe.

Might be neat to keep the copy of IEXP set for XP compat. :)

So anyway. It works! Not sure why the nightly build didn't work. This only changed the setup files to think it was XP... Then again, I didn't try the nightly build on XP either yet. :)

The Asus Eee PC I have runs at like 650MHz, and Firefox is much faster than IE at big web applications like meebo (my benchmark). With Google Chrome, meebo runs without any hesitation, as when using Firefox on my other older laptop (1ghz XP machine). So yeah, I'm making the switch on both computers. Sorry, Firefox. :(

Free internet setup on Nokia 6086

This'll work on many handsets, but here are the step-by-step I used on the Nokia 6086. I use the free dial-up service provided by NoCharge. $6/m t-zones is enough to use opera mini and google maps, but I was minimizing my plan and dropped it, since I hardly ever use these, but they can help if on a road trip and you get lost :)

Start in Menu > Settings > Configuration > Personal configuration settings. Then Options > Add New > Access Point.
Account Name: NoCharge CSD
Access Point Settings...
Data Bearer: GSM data
Bearer Settings...
Dial-up number: 3604692222
Authentication type: Normal
Data call type: Analog
Data call speed: Automatic
User name: guest
Password: password
Display terminal window: no

That's all you need to get Opera Mini working, but you can add a Web setting for t-zones as well... Make sure you go back and change Default configuration settings to Personal config. You should also add MMS into your personal configuration since it doesn't seem to fall-back to the other config for items not in your personal configuration, plus you don't want to use your CSD access point to download your picture messages, we'll use their GPRS (which doesn't allow internet connectivity without t-zones plan).

As before, Add new > Picture msg.
Server address: http://216.155.174.84/servlets/mms
Use perferred access point: No
Access Point Settings:
Proxy: Enabled
Proxy address: 216.155.165.50
Proxy port: 8080
Bearer Settings:
Packet data access point: wap.voicestream.com
Network type: IPv4
Authentication type: Normal
User name: [blank]
Password: [blank]

Voila, you have dial-up on your phone and your MMS still works. Dial-up is limited to 9600bps at best, but it does the job. Revert to t-zones when needed to use their site. Also, of course this uses your airtime because it is "dial-up". Don't say I didn't warn you.

The Nokia 6086 can run Google Mobile Maps!

T-mobile US highly restricts java applications, especially on their Nokia handsets. With my previous phone, the Nokia 6133, you could flash to an unbranded firmware and run anything. It was great. But now I have a Nokia 6086 ...

The Nokia 6086 has many certificates installed on it. Go to Menu > Settings > Security > Authority certificates > Certificate list to view them.

One certificate of interest is GeoTrust CA for UTI. UTI is Unified Testing Initiative, or Java Verified. This is the certificate real applications will get, such as Google Mobile Maps.

If you visit http://m.google.com/gmm you'll be presented with a download link, and then a popup saying something about the application not being trusted. Do not download, but instead clear your cache with Options > Other Options > Clear the cache. Then Options > Reload. Repeat until the download does not warn about the application being from an untrusted source. I was told you may have to try "like 18 times" but I believe that since I cleared my cache, it worked the 1st reload.

That's it. Congratuations, you can now use Google Maps, because they make available a signed application. Applications MUST be signed to gain access to network functions. Trust me, there is no other workaround, and getting your own application to work requires you to pay $300/yr at least to get it signed by one of the companies whose certificate is included on this handset.

Of course I also suggest Opera Mini. Just visit that site and it's been signed by multiple certs now (I see Thawte showing up for me) and should work no problem! I'm so happy they finally have decided to include this as it really really helps out us poor guys stuck with crippled T-Mobile handsets! Thanks, Opera, luv ya! :)