Xbox DRE with any drive

[SkiDragon]

My friend claims his Xbox gives DREs no matter what drive he puts in the Xbox. He has three drives, and although they are all the worst kind, I lent him one that was working fine on my own Xbox? What could cause this problem, since I am pretty sure the drive is not the sole problem. He even tried different IDE cables.

[mills]

hmmm strange....dunno whats going on there.

[InsaneDavid]

Wouldn't there be controller chips on the motherboard that interrogate and operate the DVD functions? (Don't have too much XBox experence) Possibly there could be something wrong there?

[SkiDragon]

The thing is, I think it was a gradual failure. If a chip stopped working I would imagine it would just happen all of a sudden. I should ask him if he is able to get ANY disks to word, music CDs, DVDs, etc.

[omnedon]

Is it softmodded, or a softmod attempted?

this is assuming that you have tested it with a *known* working DVDrom drive. Once you've eliminated that, then it sounds like a fubar softmod. I have seen what you describe before.

[SkiDragon]

Im also pretty sure it was never modded or attempted. His father aparently did some strange things to it when it stopped working a while ago, but it has been working more or less for quite a while since then. I suppose the drive I gave him may not have been that good, Ill have to double check it. I was just wondering if anything else could be the problem.

[omnedon]

We know nothing until it's tested with a confirmed working drive.

[ProgrammingAce]

The IDE controller is inside the northbrdge chip, they're intigrated together. If the IDE controller goes bad, then it'll take the rest of the xbox out with it. It is possible for a single function of the chip to fail, but to say it's incredably unilkely doesn't even begin to cover it. I've only ever seen it once, and still wasn't able to prove it.

I assume the xbox boots up, if the drive itself was damaged, the xbox would most likely not boot. What happens if you put in an audio CD? Honestly, it sounds as if the drives you're using all need a good cleaning/recalibration.

[SkiDragon]

Yeah, I dont trust his ability to do anything like this. He really just needs to let me take a look at it.