Xbox EEPROM Utility. OG Xbox EEPROM Utility to dump, change and edit your eeprom based on an ESP32/ESP8266. It is expandable to do some SMC related stuff too, like LED control of your console or even reboot/shutdown remotelly. Microsoft Xbox Information. Xbox is the first gaming console developed by Microsoft. It appeared on the market in November of 2001 in order to compete with already settled giants such as PlayStation 2, Dreamcast by Sega and GameCube by Nintendo. Xbox was the first independent project of Microsoft's on the gaming consoles market after a joint project with SEGA Company to develop a version of.

Further to my post How NOT to upgrade your Xbox, I’m pleased to say I’ve got it working again. It’s taken a long time, a great deal of trial-and-error, and some head-scratching. To save at least one other person some hassle, here’s my ‘journey’ from a useless Xbox to one that runs Xbox Media Center, etc.

I’ll cut to the chase: you don’t want to be reading this post unless you’ve had the same problems as I had. It’s information you could have gone to bed without knowing. Trust me.

Problem: Error code 21 on an Xbox v1.0 with an Xecuter2 modchip installed.

Solution (briefly stated): Using ConfigMagic (comes with Slayer’s Evox Autoinstaller) to manually enter MAC address (made-up) and unlock Xbox hard disk (using code from backed-up hddinfo.txt file). Transfer of backed-up copy of BIOS.bin to C: drive of Xbox via FTP. Re-flashing of EEPROM using ConfigMagic.

Moral of the story:Always have a copy of your Xbox’s EEPROM backed-up somewhere!

In the process of playing about with the BIOS, trying to get rid of the ‘flubber’ animation when the Xbox first boots, I was playing around with ConfigMagic. This program comes as part of the excellent Slayer’s Evox Autoinstaller and enables you to lock/unlock your hard disk and flash your EEPROM from a file on your hard disk.

Xbox Eeprom Reader

Once I’d accidentally flashed it with basically and empty EEPROM file, I was fairly stuck. I couldn’t re-unlock the hard disk nor could I FTP into the Xbox due to not having the information that had been previously part of the EEPROM. This information contains things like a long string of numbers that is unique to your hard disk, etc. Pretty much every site that came up when I searched on Google documented how to unlock the hard disk by connecting it to the PC and running the Liveinfo Linux distribution. That’s not an option for me – we’re laptop-only in our house!

In the end, because I’d backed-up everything on the Xbox before tinkering (always good practice) I was OK. I ended up editing the EEPROM on-the-fly, making up the MAC address of the Xbox along the lines of one suggested on this page. The unique Xbox HD key I got from a file called hddinfo which I found in the C:Backup directory in the overall Xbox backup I’d previously created. I then used the ConfigMagic program to lock the hard disk. When I rebooted it showed that the Xbox had a proper IP address (instead of 0.0.0.0 which means it can’t connect).

Original Xbox Eeprom Reader

This meant that all I needed to do was install a dashboard to allow XBMC to run. I thought this would be easy via Slayer’s Evox Autoinstaller, but it didn’t work. In the end, I simply formatted the disk, connected via FTP (with Slayer’s Evox Autoinstaller running) and transferred my backup over. Once I’d finished, I followed the instructions contained in the updated T3CH release of XBMC that I decided to install. This explains and easy way to create a shortcut from the default dashboard to the directory within which XBMC is situated (in my case, F:APPSXBMC)

So, with the xTV skin for XBMC documented at How To: Turn Your XBox Into An AppleTV I now have a wonderful home entertainment solution again! 🙂