Easy Fix to Unbrick HDDs of Million Banned Xbox 360s Arrives

From DailyTech: Microsoft came down with fire and fury upon the unsuspecting modding community. Where past rounds of bans has typically been limited to a couple thousand users, this time it kicked off over 1 million Xbox Live users. Microsoft detected modified drive firmware and installed an update on the banned consoles, bricking them.

While still technically able to play games, the consoles had their cryptographic keys revoked resulting in corruption to Gamertags and saves used with the console. Additionally, hard drive installation of games was banned and the usage of the Windows Media Player extender was disallowed. Microsoft is telling those caught with their hands in the modding cookie jar to buy new consoles.

A couple days after the ban landed, modders were already coming up with ways to circumvent it. One fix involved taking data from unmodified older units, but this fix wasn't practical for most, as it required an older, unused Xbox 360 on hand (attempting to use the restored console and the console you got the keys from would likely result in both being re-banned). While an update to the modded drive firmware is currently in the works, there was no widespread fix to remedy the damage done by Microsoft.

Now a slightly simpler solution to fix one of the major problems associated with the ban -- the bricking of the hard drive -- has landed. While the fix does require basic soldering skills, it's relatively simple -- you just solder one pin (Pin 19) on the NAND Write Protect (NWP) chip to the ground. It is recommended you install a switch in between. When grounded, the console can install games, even once the ban is in place. However, it makes your console unable to install kernel or other firmware updates. To do so, you need to temporarily unground the pin, hence the switch.

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