Running the Hitachi in another 360

After restoring my Hitachi to the original FW-state I had a crazy thought of building an external DVD-drive to use with my other 360. My idea is to enclose the Hitachi drive in an external USB-casing so I can easily hook it ip to either my PC (USB) or my 360 (SATA). In case you´re wondering how I would hook this up to my 360 without having to open it all the time read my earlier posting about the SATA-extension I made.

However as you possibly know you can´t just use the DVD-drive from one 360 in another 360 because each 360 drives firmware has it´s own unique 16-bytes key embedded. So to get the Hitachi-drive running on another machine I had to do at least the following:

• Dump the unique 16-byte key from my other 360´s Samung-drive;
• Flash the Hitachi with the obtained key from the Samsung.

Step 1 - Getting the key from the Samsung-drive
I used my earlier build bootable USB stick to boot my PC using DOS. I then used mtkflash to dump the FW of my Samsung-drive:

mtkflash r /m samsung.bin

After rebooting my PC to windows I used Keydrive Xtractor 1.5 to grab the 16-byte key from the FW like this:


Please Note: DVD Key shown is faka data

Step 2 - Preparing the FW-bin from the Hitachi
After copying the DVD-Key to the clipboard I opened the original FW from my Hitachi (orig.bin) and pasted the DVD-Key from the clipboard to the DVD-Key field. I then saved the firmware as "hits.bin".

As you probably know by now the Hitachi-FW has to be encrypted before flashing. Using a tool made by Loser named FirmCrypt I created a "ready to flash FW" using the following command:

firmcrypt e hits.bin hitse.bin

So there it is: the encrypted firmware hitse.bin ready to get flashed.

Step 3 - Flashing the Hitachi with the new key
After putting my Hitachi drive in ModeB using the SlaxVM solution I flashed the sector containing the drives key from windows XP (i being the drive-letter):

flashsec47_win i hitse.bin 90004000 1000

Please note there´s no need to flash the Master Checksum since the key is in an area of the FW not included in the checksum-calculation.

Step 4 - Attach the Hitachi to the new 360
After plugging in the power and the sata-cable (which leads to the motherboard of the new 360) and inserting COD2 it was time to fire up the new 360. And as expected: it works like a charm :)

So there it is: My Hitachi drive works in a 360 it wasn´t "married" to before. At least this part won´t stop me from building my external DVD-drive! Still not sure if I go through with it.