When you mod the 360, you alter the drive controller of the dvd-rom. The system's OS / NXE (new Xbox experience) dashboard is completely separate from this.

You can solder a chip, but this is a 40 to 60 wire process pending your model of DVD rom. The most common way to mod the dvd-rom is by "flashing" it with an "iXtreme" firmware.

Each flash process is completely different pending your hardware configuration. You need to start by determining which DVD-Rom model is inside of your 360.

From there, it's a mess of steps ... in a nut shell:

1. remove the 360's outer shell.
2. place the 360 onto your PC's inner frame to make metal to metal (ground) contact
3. With a specific SATA controller (VIA-something or other), attach the 360's DVD rom to your PC's mobo.
5. power up the PC, power up the 360
6. execute some dos commands with a pre-loaded USB thumb drive inserted into the PC
7. extract the dvd-rom's drive key. This is a series of digits printed into the drive's controller chip. It's what the 360 HDD / Mobo look for when checking for a signature match. W.O the match, the system will not boot.
8. flash away using an app w. drive key inputted into the app.

The 360 requires a rolling fix. I'm currently on the iXtreme 1.41 firmware. It still works with the latest 360 games, only if I pre-patch the .ISO image. I didn't have to patch any games from March 2009 and before.

I haven't updated to the newest iXtreme because the 360 flash is the most freaky mod I've done. I was on pins and needles the entire time during the process.


Easy if you get the flashing routine down.

No.

You need to record all 360 titles onto DVD-R DL discs. No 360 game is under 5.32Gb in size with most hitting 7.32.

To rip a game, you'll need a "Kreon" DVD-Rom from eBay. Match the "Kreon" drive and "Xbox Backup Creator" and you'll be ready to go.

Discussion is okay. I can't link anything though.