This is my first time flashing a 360 and my first time writing a tutorial. When I first started I had no idea what I was doing. I want to share what I discovered in the process of flashing my 360 start from finish.

http://www.xbox360-hacks.com/forums/vie … hp?id=2074

This is where you need to start. First discover which drive you have in Step (1). If you've got  a hitachi drive you're in the right place. Now I may be an idiot but it took me a while to figure out that there are several versions of hitachi drives out there. What does this mean to you? Newer drives have newer firmware (possibly to prevent people like us from doing what we do). I ended up spending a lot of extra money on cables that wouldn't work for my paticular drive.

Follow the instructions in Step (2) to open your Xbox 360. You will need a Torx 10 (10 being the size of the screwdriver :-) yes i did not know that). Once your 360 is open you'll need to identify what type of hitachi drive you have. This can be found by looking on the right middle side of the label. 0078fk is a drive present in some (and mine) newer drives. If you've just bought your 360 last week, you may find it has the newer 0079 drive.

Next you'll need to remove the dvd drive. You'll see a pin power connecter and a SATA cable. You have a few options for how you'll want to connect the dvd drive to your computer. The cheapest and easiest way would be with a SATA chipset. If your motherboard doesn't have one onboard you'll need to buy one on ebay.

http://search.ebay.com/search/search.dl … category0=

You'll also probably need a longer SATA cable than the one that came with the 360. You're other options are a SATA to IDE / USB. These conversions are iffy at best. You're hitachi drive may not show up in windows. Even if it does there's no garuntee that the software will support it.

Now that you have the 360 drive powered by the 360 and connected to your motherboard you'll need to set it in Modeb. Modeb allows the drive to show up in windows so it can be flashed.  To set your hitachi 0078 in modeb you'll need to download slax.

http://www.360mods.net/Downloads/details/id=59.html

slax is a linux iive cd. Burn the ISO image to a cd using IMGBurn, poweriso, etc.  Power down your pc and 360. Start your pc. Insert the live cd. Once slax begins to load start the 360. Once you get a prompt to login the drive should already be set to modeb. To confirm try ejecting your dvd drive. If it takes two pushes to close it then it is in modeb. Push it 3 times while it is open to make sure it does not automatically open again.

Power down your pc and boot back into windows. Make sure the drivers for your SATA chipset are installed. You may need to restart but your DVD drive should show up in My Computer.

From here on out follow this tutorial.

http://forums.afterdawn.com/thread_view.cfm/440449

If you encounter errors make sure you are running the latest version of fwtoolbox. If your computer freezes during RAW image dump then 99% of the time you are using incompatible hardware. This happend to me when trying to use SATA -> USB even though the drive was showing up in windows. The problem was fixed when I used a sata -> sata.

There is a very real danger of bricking your dvd drive. I managed to avoid it being a complete noob on my first try. Do plenty of reading. If something isn't as described in the various tutorials stop and think about it.

Here's how much money I had to spend.

1 SATA chipset. $15
10 Dual Layer DVD + R. $22

Here's how much more money I spent because I didn't do enough reading before purchasing.

1 IDE to SATA cable. $30
1 SATA to USB cable. $30 (with shipping).
1 Pioneer DVD burner. $25 (turned out my current burner worked fine).

You can have your 360 flashed and playing backups for as little as $22 bucks if you have the right hardware. Most people will just need the SATA chipset. Good luck and happy flashing ;-)