Do I Need To Flash an XBox 360 Drive to Replace It?

You may have heard, or you may not have heard, that you NEED to flash an XBox 360 drive when you install it into your XBox 360. True? FALSE!

The truth is, the XBox 360's DVD drive and motherboard are "locked" together (by a special software lock and key)! You can not simply purchase a new XBox 360 DVD Drive and install it into your XBox 360. If you do this, your XBox 360 will read DVD movies with no problem... but it will not read games.

So how can you replace your XBox 360's DVD drive and have it read games? There are two ways. One way is to flash the drive. Flashing a DVD drive, in essence, is reading the special software key from the broken DVD drive and writing that special key to the new DVD drive you've purchase. Sounds easy? It's NOT! It requires special hardware, special software, and if you're not careful you can kill (or brick) the new drive!

The second, and much easier way, to transfer that special key from your old DVD drive to the new one is to simply remove the 4 (or 6) screws on the bottom of your old broken DVD drive, pull out the old green circuit board at the bottom of the DVD drive (which contains the special key), and install that same board into the new drive you purchase. The trick here is that you MUST purchase the SAME make and model DVD drive as you have had in your system. This is not that difficult as there are only 4 in the original XBox 360s and only 1 in the XBox 360 slim as of this writing.

Original XBox 360:
Toshiba Samsung TS-H943 [Var: TS-H943A]
HL Hitachi GDR-3120L
Philips BenQ VAD-6038
Philips Lite-On DG-16D2S [Var: DG-16D2S-09C]

XBox 360 S:
Philips Lite-On DG16D4S

The following page on my website shows you exactly how to find out which drive is in your system and contains step-by-step instructions on changing out that circuit board. You can also send in your dead drive and we'll send you a replacement drive with your original circuit board inside. Just click the following page:

http://store.richspsxparts.com/xb360reti.html