what bios

[chunk1982]

what bios do you use and why? does it matter about what bios if your tsop and not hardmod

all the best

paul

[bigkidoz]

I've been using iND5003, it works with everything i have and do to my consoles and see no need to change.

[chunk1982]

thanks bigkidoz could you tell me what you have done to your xbox? im currently using m8+, i have not come across any issues yet but i was wondering if one had more features then the others or is more stable.
my plans are to slim my box and i would like to not have to keep the dvd board in there, also install a 1tb+ hdd and some l.e.d's here and there

all the best

paul

[asbo]

I'm using the M8+ VGA bios with no DVD drive. Works well. I have no idea why I picked it over others though

[chunk1982]

Thanks asbo, have u removed the dvd motherboard as well? What size hdd are you using? I did read somewhere that the m8+ along side a removed dvd and sata hdd can be temperamental booting?

Many thanks

Paul

[asbo]

have u removed the dvd motherboard as well?

yes

What size hdd are you using?

I think its an 80GB one, definitely below 500GB. Its IDE.

I did read somewhere that the m8+ along side a removed dvd and sata hdd can be temperamental booting?

Yeah I think I've seen that too, probably xmans experimenting.
Since I have all my media on a server the hard drive is just for a few games, never had to mess around with adapters and suchlike

[captainsensation]

x2 5035. Using it because i have an x2 modchip. I liked ind 5003 but i wasnt clear on the advantages of one over the other. The live loading screen is annoying but i am not having any issues with it otherwise.

[chunk1982]

Thanks guys I may have a play and give them a try

All the best

Paul

[bigkidoz]

A slim wont boot with a sata hdd and no dvd pcb, many have tried different bioses but without luck.
Ide hdd is fine though for a slim, i wish sata hdd's would work .

[professor_jonny]

A slim wont boot with a sata hdd and no dvd pcb, many have tried different bioses but without luck.

I have managed to get it to boot without an dvd drive by a hardware hack but the results are not worth more investment in time.

It is an issue with the drive and adaptor being to slow to come online before the xbox wants it.
some how the hardware init of the dvd drive adds delay.
you can hold the xbox in reset when it is powered and it will load but timing has to be precise or it will frag and reset, once in every 10 boots it will boot.

but there is other complications such as read and write errors even if it does boot up but I don't know why.

It needs the bios modified but there is issuies with that because of the way the bios is internally adressed and it makes things very hard to inject code without breaking other things.

someone cleaver needs to come along.

[fxmech]

For me, my 2TB drive was acting funny at boot. When I removed the boot animation, my xbox wouldn't boot.
I basically figured, if the "Dashboard" path is a file in a directory, it's just an iota of time somewhere during init where stuff gets jiggered.
Other people out there have had voodoo-like success with their adapters and faster boots or solved issues by setting a couple extra hoops, if you will. Set one dash on one partition to boot another that boots another using shortcuts.
I don't recall which partition they were booting from. My take away is a suspicion that mounting the partitions takes longer on larger (most SATA) drives.
For me, the solution was to switch banks back to x3 bios and wait for the slow boot.

[fxmech]

I forgot to mention that I had my DVD drive in all-along.