Flashing the Xbox 360

Finally flashed the console's drive with the iXtreme 1.6 firmware; before that it was 1.4.1. Earlier I couldn't get around to it for understandable reasons, but now I have free time both to flash it and to play new games.

Still, it's a hassle taking apart an Xbox 360 for the first time with makeshift tools, even with a detailed guide — it's especially hard to release a row of latches at the back all at once.

I flashed a Philips-BenQ VAD6038 drive on an Asus P4P800-E Deluxe motherboard. I did everything according to the guides from Xboxland.net; at first I tried JungleFlasher, but the program didn't detect the drive, it only found one I/O Port. After that I rebooted several times, changed the BIOS settings, setting "Enhanced Mode Support On" to "S-ATA+P-ATA", as in the screenshots. The drive was detected fine in the BIOS, although in the example it was "Secondary IDE Mater", while mine was only "Fourth IDE Mater". I even put the drive into service mode, leaving the tray half-closed, although that shouldn't have affected whether the drive was detected. Besides JungleFlasher I also tried DosFlash, but this program didn't find the drive either.

After several reboots and setting changes I didn't know what to do, I was thinking of either getting an additional SATA controller or updating the BIOS, since I couldn't remember ever updating it. Toward the end I also connected the drive to a different SATA port and set "Onboard IDE Operate Mode" in the BIOS to "Compatible mode", although the guide said something different. JungleFlasher still kept finding only one port, while in DosFlash it was detected without any trouble and flashed according to the guide without problems — I didn't even need to put it into service mode again.

There's still something about this I don't understand, and the guides, it turns out, aren't complete either.