Right. So i started this adventure by turning on the 360, and to my surprise, the disc drive just made a little bit of noise... and didn't read any discs. Great! so i thought 'it's probably the drive is broken.' So i buy a new drive, to find out it's a benq drive. I didn't realize at the time of buying, that it's not as easy to just switch drives as it is in a pc.

So here's where i'm at: new drive plays dvds and cd's,but not games, old drive... powers on, opens, just doesn't read discs (ANY discs).
Reading around, it looks like i need to remove the key (not exactly sure what this is atm, my best guess is it's a security key microsoft puts on the drives to prevent hacking) from the original drive, and put it into the new drive... but the possibility of it being banned or getting an error still exists.... So i've read so far.

I don't want to put CFW on these drives either, just original, unless i can't avoid it.

So the questions i have are these:

1. Do i need to use different methods to take the information i need off the first drive, and put it on the second? The first being a hitachi, the second being a benq?

2. Is there a tutorial somewhere that explains specifically how to do what i want to do? Or will i need to infer from other tutorials/info? I don't mind doing the research, but i'm not exactly sure where to start.

3. Is there a way of doing this that won't result in an error on the 360?

4. I've found a few tutorials online that involve different firmware toolbox versions, will a newer version work with a tutorial based on an older version? IE 4.5 tutorial, but i have 4.8 fw?


Thanks for your help and time guys!