chroma
15th November, 2009, 03:34 AM
Requirements:
1x Banned xbox
1x Bricked xbox board (rrod/e74/dropped from orbit whatever)
1x adjustable heat gun
1x soldering iron with the finest tip you can lay your grubby mits on.
1x solder's (i used 95/5 tin-silver fluxless, 60/40 tin-lead flux core)
1x tube of flux
1x desolder pump (not essential really)
1x helping hands magnifiery mah doo thingy (crocodile clips and a lens thing) fairly essential.
1x hot melt glue gun with glue sticks.
Assorted torx drivers, tweezers, needlenose pliers etc, funky tool to unclib the box (or like me a paperclip repurposed) typical tools in otherwords.
The ability to reflash your drive
A steady hand, nerves of steel (and balls to match) and a keen eye.
Previous knowledge of stripping a board down (or google it if your unsure)
I finished work tonight and headed round to my mates to cheer him up from the recent ban and discuss some code we've been working on.
Hes got a few boards that are busted (friends, family, ebay and the like that they've dumped on him rather than toss out)
We wound up surfing around looking for a procedure to unban a box and came across one that seemed fairly involved and elaborate, requiring a lot of tools, time and messing around.
It stated that it was possible via a shitload of reflashing decoding and general tweaking. After a few beers it seemed way to complicated, especialy cosidering it needed a working clean box of which we had only mine (and im not that good a friend to give over my cpu id to let him get us both banned)
Anyway the guide basicly talked you through getting the cpu code and dumping the nand flash via jtag then decoding, messing around with the clean stuff and hacking the old nand to be clean, certain conditions needed to be met, like not having upgraded for eons (already screwed) and both boards to work (another small roadblock)
Screw that, in true Tim Allen "MOAR POWAR" style we concluded that it was the method of PANSIE ASSED LOSERS WHO CANT HANDLE MANTOOLS LIKE PNUMATIC HAMMERS AND SHIT!
We decided it would be far more awesome than a robot caveman punching god in the dick to take a hammer to a job requiring a surgical scalpel.
And we did.
Stripped down the banned box to see this NAND flash thingymagubbins and get to work.
(Face it we had nothing to lose and a stack of bricked boards to perfect the method)
Im better at soldering so i took the helm and desoldered the shit out of the nand on a bricked board, just apply flux liberaly to let things get loose, wet and the heat to really soften the solder. It came off pretty fast with a few burst from a desolder pump, its still a fiddly job though with the solder joints being so damned slow, but taking shit off is easy.
Next the CPU needed to come off, we stripped off the heatsinks in a less than timid manner (hey the boards busted, whats the problem?) and then got out the heatgun and cranked the volume up to ELEVEN.
CPUS are "ball grid array" meaning theyre not supposed to be swappable, they never thought of idiots on rum and beers though fortunately.
We just cooked the thing till it was able to be gently prized off with a small flathead screwdriver. (go easy here otherwise you'll do it wrong and fail hard)
if you dont cook it enough then "BALLS R TOUCHING" and youve gayed it.
Cook it too much and you get smoke, fire, fumes and fried processors.
So yeah its a dellicate job and not the one to rush, also being a freakshow grade contortionist will help (about the only time i can think of where being able to bend into positions to lick your own anus are of benifit)
I let my mate strip down his banned box to the bare board (ie remove the heatsink and so forth using lessons learned from the previous "just rip the thing off manauvre")
Whilst he was doing that i was sitting at a desk with the processor clipped into the helping hands thing upside down and was carefully resoldering all the balls.
This as it turns out is a nightmare of a job so be prepared to go squint eyed and begin to loose the plot.
I used 95/5 tin-silver solder, it has no flux or lead so it wont remelt untill it gets to stupidly high temperatures, its also stupidly expensive (ive always bought in drums though so strands might be cheaper) bitwise i used a a 0.2mm conical tip.
The iron needs to be stupidly hot to melt this stuff and you really need to work each ball quickly to avoid damage (no small feat when pished as a fart) you need to make sure you add enough to make a tiny ball but not too much as to short when you attatch it to the board and they all melt together.
like i said, fidly, frustrating and you seriously need the patience of a saint.
Needless to say whlst i spent an eternity on this woeful task he had stripped the board right down, and proceeded to reflash the drive to stock firmware, then went and made some "old skool" cocktails.
Once the nightmare had passed we just repeated the same procedure on the banned board, removed the nand and cpu.
Then i set him on prepping the board for the cpu (re-tinning the joints for the BGA CPU and nand flash chip, removing excess solder and cleaning the lot up) then i set about tinning the nand, and soldering it to the board (another pain of a job) its fiddly so dont rush it, a relatively easy job after the cpu prep.
Almost done!
The next job is the worst nightmare.
BGA's are set by robots with nice tolerances and the ability to work in microns, two pished friends are not configured or tooled for this purpose.
Which is where the keen eye comes in.
carefully by eye line up all the balls with the contacts by squinting sideways.
then realise that its a two dimentional grid and you need to repeat it with the adjacent side, once youve got it lined up on both planes your good to go.
The next problem was that one of us would need to keep it in place whilst the other torched the board with the heat gun, neither wanted the job of "hold the red hot processor" and several games of rock-paper-scissors nor coin tosses resolved the issue.
SUPERGLUE!
no you dumbshit! superglue will keep the processor away from the board and the contacts will all mely but the processor wont sink on to em! besides it will fume and we'll see finger prints everywhere like those csi doods and im neither sober enough nor drunk enough to face that.
So it was decided in stylistic Horatio Cain monotone with added effect pauses that "HOT MELT!" should be used to affix the processor. (then we donned the shades just to drive home the point whilst he screamed "YEEEEEEEEeeeeeeeeeahhhhhh"
So whilst listening to "The who" we placed a tiny dab on two corners across the diagonal, with the rationale that it would melt as the solder does and things would go well.
(dont forsake us Pete Townsend)
This seemed to work, although it was a slow dubious process that was doubtful and again it was back to "how hot do we really wanna make this?"
Needless to say, Mojitos where consumed whilst the bloody hing cooled back down and we then reassembled the unit for the moment of truth.
It powered up flawlessly which was nice and unexpected.
Plugged it into tinternets and voila back on live without a hitch!
Drunken idiots 1
Microsoft NILL.
Synopsis.
1:Strip down the donor board and timmidly remove both the nand chip and cpu (see picture)
2:clean processor and nand chips and prep for donation.
3:strip down the banned board, and discard the banned nand and cpu.
4:clean the nand and cpu terminals
5:reflash the dvd drive to stock firmware
6:reattatch the donor nand
7:align the cpu by trial and error and fix in position with a tiny ammount of glue.
8:fix it by blasting the sucker whilst keeping it level and flat at all times
9: reassemble the unbanned box
10: power up and test.
11: pull off a heart surgery where brain surgery was recommended to achieve the same result.
Its only really usefull if youve already got another board to strip, but face it a bricked box can be gotten hold of from ebay as "spares or repair" for next to nothing.
The margin for error however is pretty bad, you really need to be OCD level carefull and patient, at several points during the prep of the cpu i had to just walk away and take a break and im fairly advanced with an iron.
It took ages (mainly due to initial trial and error of removing the cpu's) and general tedious prep.
so yeah i sure it can all go wrong at a number of stages (as a couple of early processors will attest to) but we had nothing to lose and "STICKING IT TO THE MAN" to gain.
1x Banned xbox
1x Bricked xbox board (rrod/e74/dropped from orbit whatever)
1x adjustable heat gun
1x soldering iron with the finest tip you can lay your grubby mits on.
1x solder's (i used 95/5 tin-silver fluxless, 60/40 tin-lead flux core)
1x tube of flux
1x desolder pump (not essential really)
1x helping hands magnifiery mah doo thingy (crocodile clips and a lens thing) fairly essential.
1x hot melt glue gun with glue sticks.
Assorted torx drivers, tweezers, needlenose pliers etc, funky tool to unclib the box (or like me a paperclip repurposed) typical tools in otherwords.
The ability to reflash your drive
A steady hand, nerves of steel (and balls to match) and a keen eye.
Previous knowledge of stripping a board down (or google it if your unsure)
I finished work tonight and headed round to my mates to cheer him up from the recent ban and discuss some code we've been working on.
Hes got a few boards that are busted (friends, family, ebay and the like that they've dumped on him rather than toss out)
We wound up surfing around looking for a procedure to unban a box and came across one that seemed fairly involved and elaborate, requiring a lot of tools, time and messing around.
It stated that it was possible via a shitload of reflashing decoding and general tweaking. After a few beers it seemed way to complicated, especialy cosidering it needed a working clean box of which we had only mine (and im not that good a friend to give over my cpu id to let him get us both banned)
Anyway the guide basicly talked you through getting the cpu code and dumping the nand flash via jtag then decoding, messing around with the clean stuff and hacking the old nand to be clean, certain conditions needed to be met, like not having upgraded for eons (already screwed) and both boards to work (another small roadblock)
Screw that, in true Tim Allen "MOAR POWAR" style we concluded that it was the method of PANSIE ASSED LOSERS WHO CANT HANDLE MANTOOLS LIKE PNUMATIC HAMMERS AND SHIT!
We decided it would be far more awesome than a robot caveman punching god in the dick to take a hammer to a job requiring a surgical scalpel.
And we did.
Stripped down the banned box to see this NAND flash thingymagubbins and get to work.
(Face it we had nothing to lose and a stack of bricked boards to perfect the method)
Im better at soldering so i took the helm and desoldered the shit out of the nand on a bricked board, just apply flux liberaly to let things get loose, wet and the heat to really soften the solder. It came off pretty fast with a few burst from a desolder pump, its still a fiddly job though with the solder joints being so damned slow, but taking shit off is easy.
Next the CPU needed to come off, we stripped off the heatsinks in a less than timid manner (hey the boards busted, whats the problem?) and then got out the heatgun and cranked the volume up to ELEVEN.
CPUS are "ball grid array" meaning theyre not supposed to be swappable, they never thought of idiots on rum and beers though fortunately.
We just cooked the thing till it was able to be gently prized off with a small flathead screwdriver. (go easy here otherwise you'll do it wrong and fail hard)
if you dont cook it enough then "BALLS R TOUCHING" and youve gayed it.
Cook it too much and you get smoke, fire, fumes and fried processors.
So yeah its a dellicate job and not the one to rush, also being a freakshow grade contortionist will help (about the only time i can think of where being able to bend into positions to lick your own anus are of benifit)
I let my mate strip down his banned box to the bare board (ie remove the heatsink and so forth using lessons learned from the previous "just rip the thing off manauvre")
Whilst he was doing that i was sitting at a desk with the processor clipped into the helping hands thing upside down and was carefully resoldering all the balls.
This as it turns out is a nightmare of a job so be prepared to go squint eyed and begin to loose the plot.
I used 95/5 tin-silver solder, it has no flux or lead so it wont remelt untill it gets to stupidly high temperatures, its also stupidly expensive (ive always bought in drums though so strands might be cheaper) bitwise i used a a 0.2mm conical tip.
The iron needs to be stupidly hot to melt this stuff and you really need to work each ball quickly to avoid damage (no small feat when pished as a fart) you need to make sure you add enough to make a tiny ball but not too much as to short when you attatch it to the board and they all melt together.
like i said, fidly, frustrating and you seriously need the patience of a saint.
Needless to say whlst i spent an eternity on this woeful task he had stripped the board right down, and proceeded to reflash the drive to stock firmware, then went and made some "old skool" cocktails.
Once the nightmare had passed we just repeated the same procedure on the banned board, removed the nand and cpu.
Then i set him on prepping the board for the cpu (re-tinning the joints for the BGA CPU and nand flash chip, removing excess solder and cleaning the lot up) then i set about tinning the nand, and soldering it to the board (another pain of a job) its fiddly so dont rush it, a relatively easy job after the cpu prep.
Almost done!
The next job is the worst nightmare.
BGA's are set by robots with nice tolerances and the ability to work in microns, two pished friends are not configured or tooled for this purpose.
Which is where the keen eye comes in.
carefully by eye line up all the balls with the contacts by squinting sideways.
then realise that its a two dimentional grid and you need to repeat it with the adjacent side, once youve got it lined up on both planes your good to go.
The next problem was that one of us would need to keep it in place whilst the other torched the board with the heat gun, neither wanted the job of "hold the red hot processor" and several games of rock-paper-scissors nor coin tosses resolved the issue.
SUPERGLUE!
no you dumbshit! superglue will keep the processor away from the board and the contacts will all mely but the processor wont sink on to em! besides it will fume and we'll see finger prints everywhere like those csi doods and im neither sober enough nor drunk enough to face that.
So it was decided in stylistic Horatio Cain monotone with added effect pauses that "HOT MELT!" should be used to affix the processor. (then we donned the shades just to drive home the point whilst he screamed "YEEEEEEEEeeeeeeeeeahhhhhh"
So whilst listening to "The who" we placed a tiny dab on two corners across the diagonal, with the rationale that it would melt as the solder does and things would go well.
(dont forsake us Pete Townsend)
This seemed to work, although it was a slow dubious process that was doubtful and again it was back to "how hot do we really wanna make this?"
Needless to say, Mojitos where consumed whilst the bloody hing cooled back down and we then reassembled the unit for the moment of truth.
It powered up flawlessly which was nice and unexpected.
Plugged it into tinternets and voila back on live without a hitch!
Drunken idiots 1
Microsoft NILL.
Synopsis.
1:Strip down the donor board and timmidly remove both the nand chip and cpu (see picture)
2:clean processor and nand chips and prep for donation.
3:strip down the banned board, and discard the banned nand and cpu.
4:clean the nand and cpu terminals
5:reflash the dvd drive to stock firmware
6:reattatch the donor nand
7:align the cpu by trial and error and fix in position with a tiny ammount of glue.
8:fix it by blasting the sucker whilst keeping it level and flat at all times
9: reassemble the unbanned box
10: power up and test.
11: pull off a heart surgery where brain surgery was recommended to achieve the same result.
Its only really usefull if youve already got another board to strip, but face it a bricked box can be gotten hold of from ebay as "spares or repair" for next to nothing.
The margin for error however is pretty bad, you really need to be OCD level carefull and patient, at several points during the prep of the cpu i had to just walk away and take a break and im fairly advanced with an iron.
It took ages (mainly due to initial trial and error of removing the cpu's) and general tedious prep.
so yeah i sure it can all go wrong at a number of stages (as a couple of early processors will attest to) but we had nothing to lose and "STICKING IT TO THE MAN" to gain.