AE#30 Repairing An Original Microsoft Xbox Video Game Console

[Music] greetings this is already from artifact electronics I found this original Xbox at a thrift shop and it came with the Xbox itself a really short power cord it's about two feet long and I don't think that's original but it does fit and most importantly the proprietary AV cable which can usually cost you more than the Xbox itself but it was tagged at ten dollars seemed like a good deal until of course I went and I plugged it in hit the power button and nothing happened it won't power up but I was still intrigued and it is a thrift shop after all so you're doing a good deed by buying something there so I figured I'd do my good deed thought I was kind of intrigued I haven't been inside an original Xbox for quite some time and would be neat to see if we can get this guy up and running again so this is what I call a virgin Xbox and by that I mean it looks like it has it has never been opened now that's both good and bad I mean the good thing is is nobody's open this so nobody's mucked around in there and use the cattle-prod to change components but the bad part is is that this is unmodified so it doesn't have a modchip that would obviously be indicated by it having been opened how do I know that and I'll tell you there are four screws underneath these rubber feet and you basically pray off the rubber feet and remove them and that could have happened there's no way of telling but there are two more screws hidden under the stickers the first one is over here you can kind of feel it and these are foil stickers so if you try to remove the sticker and then got the screw you cannot remove these stickers because they'll tear apart when you're trying to lift them and there's also a second screw right here don't know if you can see that but there's a screw here and a screw here and if it was ever opened you would see a hole in here or you would see the sticker partially ripped off so we're gonna have to of course put a hole in here to get those screws out but let's go ahead and see if we can remove the case I went ahead and pry it off the rubber feet and basically I'll show you one I'm just sticking a knife in there lifting them off they're self stick so I don't know if they're gonna stay in place when I replace them but they reveal a t15 Torx screw each and I also went ahead and cut holes into the stickers so instead of just sticking a screwdriver in there and ripping the out of the sticker I thought I'd take a sharp knife and cut out the outline of it and so these also reveal to 315 screws so now we can remove those screws but first let's have a look at the serial number and try to date this unit so if we look at the serial number sticker that says manufacturing date 2004 Oh 322 which I think means March 22nd 2004 but the the serial number right underneath it tells us a little bit differently about the date now there's sites on the internet that tell you how to interpret these codes but the serial number seems to I mean it does verify that was built in 2004 but the and that's the affor and the second group of numbers in the serial number but the 13 indicates that it was made in the 13th week and while we know that it was made early to middle 2004 and the o5 at the very end indicates that it was manufactured in China and what that the date and the China manufacturers manufacturing they mean is that this most likely contains a motherboard of version 1.2 through 1.5 and in order to exactly determine the motherboard version we're gonna have to look at the graphics chip inside and that will give us final resolution on the version number so I removed most of the screws just using it t 15 screwdriver you can see these are some manly screws let's put these in a safe place and see if we can get a pop off and the case does seem to come apart I forget something in here there you go and there's the inside looks nice and clean the grubbing is from the outside has not made its way in so let's set that aside and have a look here so we have a so we have the hard drive on the left and that hard drive let's see what it says blah blah blah blah and I guess I'd have to convert the LBA to figure out what the size of this is but it doesn't tell me with the size of it it's a Seagate model ST 31 3100 14 AC e and it's an IDE drive but if we get this thing to power up we'll know I mean I could probably look this up online but let's start getting I mean the motherboards underneath all of this so I'm gonna have to take out the drive and the cd-rom let's get started with the hard drive so we remove this from this little holding tab bag the ID bringing the power cable and move it from the channel here actually then we can see there's two t10 screws here that one comes out easy and that one is completely hidden in there but this thing in the magnetic at all so it won't come out to overcome that we'll get this magnetic pointer she doesn't fit far enough so well at least we got one of them out in order to get up the other one fetch a pair of tweezers and see if I can grab the school with that and I keep grabbing it that keeps falling back but there you go just doesn't want to stay so this means now that the hard drive assembly should pop out and it does revealing part of the motherboard bit dusty in there but we'll get that cleaned out and next we have to take out cd-rom and for the cd-rom I can see the t10 screw buried so let's keep trying and there you go so does that mean this whole thing lifts out now or is there another screw in here oh I can't send another screw so without boring you to death let me play around with it for a bit and see if I can get that thing to come out I fiddled around a bit but this thing and it did finally come out of course we'll set it aside we have to remove the IDE cable and the power cable and now we have full access to the inside as you can see it's pretty dusty looking around a bit first thing I see is there's a fuse in here so we're gonna go ahead and measure that most that everything looks okay except I can see three caps put bulging tars this one this one and this one and you might not be able to see it but yes they are they're bulging pretty good so I'm gonna have to remove these well replace these and see if they leaked anything but first let's go in and see if we can get really lucky here and see if the fuse has decided to blow nope the fuse is good so we're gonna have to do some tests to see if the power supply board down here is generating any voltages and then kind of start following up on that it's the first order of business what was to get out the motherboard the motherboard came out by removing there were 10 screws t10 screws holding it in place and there was a power supply connector and assorted other connectors here front panel fan that I am plugged and after removing those the a motherboard came out rather easily so I figured let's go in and just do a simple continuity check on those capacitors that were bulged so the first one is over here and it charges up the second one is over here and that one's showing it that short so that's a good thing I mean for troubleshooting purposes of course and this one charges up kind of slowly but when it hits about 70 ohms the beep turns off and so it looks like this one may be shorted now just for completeness let's switch to capacitance those are 22 hundreds or 3300 marked and it just keeps saying overload overload overload so those three caps need to be pulled so let's go ahead and pull them and measure them out a circuit and see what they have to say when they're when they've been taken out so first off that measurement that yielded a dead short was my fault I measured the wrong terminals I basically measured ground to ground so that's why but I took all the bulging ones out in two extra ones because they're the exact same make and the values as the three that were bulging and I think if those three were bulging the other two weren't far behind so I took them all out anyway I replaced them with identically SPECT the cheek on caps over here caps are physically a bit bigger but they're exact replacements and I thought be interesting to measure some of these caps that I took out and see what the ESR meter has to say because obviously the multimeter can't measure that high so it's showing a good ESR and they're supposed to be 3,300 so this particular one dropped in value but it it's not really reading bad so one more maybe to see what this one has to say and this one as a good ESR and set of 3,300 measures almost 4500 so they're a little bit out of range as far as the capacitance is concerned but I'm not exactly sure if they're far enough out of range to cause the mother board not to boot so let's do a simple test without putting the whole thing back together but rather just putting in and putting it back in the case and connecting the power supply and seeing if it turns on which we can observe by watching the fan spin so I put the motherboard back in hooked up the essentials and I also hooked up the video cable to see if it has anything to tell us it's obviously going to error out because there's no heart and no hard drive or no DVD drive in here but sorry that's not a DVD drive that's a CD drive but since nothing's in there let's just say if it if it comes on now we got power we've got pretty much everything the fan spins oh and it boots up so even though the capacitors electrically looked out of range but physically look bad I guess whatever was happening in there was preventing it from powering on so it's on the fan is running but of course it's trying a hard drive and then it tells you service required call customer support and that usually happens if it is unable to read the hard disk and we're seeing the red ring of death over here which says I can't work so what we got to do is put it all back together but one other thing needs to be done on the motherboard now that we can see it work and I'll tell you in a minute what that is the remaining tasks I'm talking about is these machines are over ten years old so the heat transfer paste on the CPU and the GPU are probably solidified by now now I finagled open the Eclipse and this one the CPU heatsink comes off and we can see the leftovers here however I remove the clip from the GPU and that one's frozen solid and that's again to be expected because it gets really hot and I guess the transfer paste turns to glue so what I want to do is put the heat sinks back on and power it up and let it run for a few minutes and maybe the heat from the GPU will loosen this heatsink over here now remember never run these without the heat sinks in place because the chips were almost immediately self-destruct so in my experience here alcohol isopropyl does not work very well to remove the pace so I have some acetone in here and we can see that the acetone removes it pretty well as you can see from the edges same thing on the processor I mean on the GPU but it's going to take several passes to get this off so I'll be back when it's clean took several passes to get the gunk off but finally everything came off you can clearly see the chips and the heatsink for the GPU and for the CPU well completely clean when you're cleaning these don't use any sharp edged instruments because what you're going to do is Nick the aluminum surface and that's going to negatively affect heat transfer you want things to be as flat as possible so now the next thing we do is we put some heat sink compound on there what a shame we just cleaned it right anyway and this one if there's anything left in here put them right in the middle it's probably a bit too much but rather more more as a little better than less and for the GPU and put one in the middle and distribute some more around it probably also a bit too much but again as I said better more than less the next thing we do is we take the heat sinks put them in place and push down on them for a while what I do is I put something heavy like a transformer on top of it and what that'll do is it'll evenly distribute the paste and hopefully get rid of any air bubbles in there at the same time so we'll let this sit just for a short while which should put it in place and then we'll put the clip the clip on so that's enough but is in place now for the CPU yep it distributes nicely and we do the exact same thing here we'll put that in place and put a weight on it so that kind of distributes itself on there you also want to check the offence on the heat sinks if you bent any of them while removing the heat sinks you want to make sure you bent them back in place so you could pull heat sink operation out of these things so we let it sit for a little longer and then I will then I'll put the Eclipse back in place and then we can start reassembling the machine here's what it looks like with the motherboard reinstalled no drives yet but we have the heatsinks in place we have a all of the screws in place and we plugged in the stuff that connects to the case controllers one and two front buttons and controllers three and four and of course the power supply itself and again before putting in the drives let's just do a quick sanity test here and you can hear it going through the motions it comes up we have a video display so okay let's put it all back let's put the drives back in and put an actual put an actual game disk in there looks like I may have misspoken not may have what actually did miss be I initially called this the DVD Drive then I reversed myself and called it a CD drive but the I don't know what I was thinking I was probably thinking I was working on a PlayStation 1 this is in fact a DVD drive and in order to test that as a DVD drive for a movie DVD drive I can't do that I'm missing the remote and the remote receiver for DVD playback but what we can do is put a game in and see if the game comes up so one more thing we're gonna need here is a controller which looks like this and so let's boot it up so it booted off of the hard drive we're not getting any error messages so the hard drives good and finally let's put in a game an oldie but goodie it's half-life 2 but let's see if it recognizes the disk and if we can actually play a game on it so when it stops blinking that's usually a good sign that means it recognized the disk and there you go valve comes up and so on and so forth can we button through any of this no of course not but looks like the repair was successful I have a fully working Xbox here so let me put the top back on and then we can end and with that we will end this episode so here's the final result let's give it a final test by trying to load a different game and while we're waiting for that closing the words on this it came back together nicely needs a little bit more cleanup the nooks and crannies I mean they always put these structures on here that love to collect dust but I guess that's the way it is reading through the documentation there's one more thing people recommend and that is there's a super capacitor in here of one farad not microphone but one farad capacitor which maintains power to the real-time clock and I guess they have a higher occurrence of going bad however I observed the one in here the clock seems to work there was no bulging on the cap no leakage or anything like that and I didn't happen to have a 1 farad capacitor lying around so I left it in and I'll put that on my to-do list the next time the next time I buy parts I'll probably buy some of the super capacitors and replace the one in here even though it looked just fine but there are several reports of it misbehaving and so that's something you may want to consider doing when you're fixing up an Xbox so here you go this is not it's fixed it's not exactly a high highly desirable machine but you know just wait in another 5 or 10 years this is going to be the first game system that Microsoft built and people are gonna be asking gazillions of dollars for it so I'll put this into my retirement account or retirement fund closet or box or whatever and in a few years I'll sell it on eBay and I'll be rich thanks for watching please click the like button and subscribe if you haven't already but I hope you liked what you saw and the next time you come across one of these at a thrift shop or wherever and it's cheap go ahead and pick it up because obviously this guide will help you to fix it and if you have a completely different problem there is a lot of documentation on the internet about these because there are a lot of them out there and people have addressed a lot of ways to fix these have a good one and see you later

Channel: Artifact Electronics

Views: 86,235

Rating: 4.7947931 out of 5

Keywords: artifact, electronics, microsoft, xbox, original, repair, capacitor, leaky, dead, not working

Id: ku0n5IPhisc

Length: 31min 8sec (1868 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 19 2017