So I ordered this ghost blue replacement case for my 360; I wanted to change the casing/dvd box and everything so that it looks kind of neat. The 360 turned out to be a bit confusing at first to open, but once inside, it went well. I replaced the air tunnel, the top of the dvd drive, even installed those blue leds that came with the case. Case leds are very 2001 but who gives a fuck.
I put everything back together, hook it back up. The unit starts for a second, then turns out. What the fuck? I try a few times, and decided to not do anything crazy since there was a short somewhere. I take it apart again, check things; rehook the poor thing, same thing. It starts for a second, then turns off.
I take the thing back to this small underground repair shop for consoles where i work, the guys check it out during the day and ring me back. Those guys are really hardcore and know their shit, I've trust them for years
It turns out that there was a freak short somewhere that actually blew up and nuked the security chips on the 360's dvd-rom drive. Holy fuck.
The 360 has a pretty wacky security system that involves a special key hidden in a writable chip on the dvdrom, and another (non writable) part of the motherboard; when the machine boots, it checks both keys and then lets you start up, pretty much (this is a pretty simplified explanation)
The guy tested the drive on a debug machine he has, and it actually worked fine since his debug kit doesnt check for those keys on the dvdrom.
So, it turns out that my 360 is actually still in perfect working order; except for the fact that the dvd-rom has his security key completly blanked out. There is no way to fix this since each 'pair' inside each 360 has a different key. I can't go out and buy another drive off ebay or anything. The guy told me that in a hilarious twist of fake, it would had been trivial to restore everything if I had modded my console before; since the process involved making a backup of that stupid key.
Now i'm stuck with a 360 that is still in perfect working order, except for a blanked security key. I can't send it to Microsoft, and I can't make a frankentein out of it like I did with my old xbox which was modded, gutted and modified to death.
This sucks
Microsoft, why did you have to be so hardcore about security this time.
