Hardware Xbox 360 HDD Interface Problem

[RazMasters]

Hello, folks. Like many console modders on the 'net, I've read your site many times (and am grateful for its wealth of information), but have never posted. Today, since Google is failing me, I've finally registered. Now, here's my dilemma:

I own three Xbox 360s. Two are Elite models, while one is a plain launch system. The other day, I experienced skipping issues, and various other problems. Eventually, games began freezing up. Naturally, I suspected the discs or the disc drive. Testing a few different games didn't produce other results, however. We put the original title back in, and thought we'd try installing it to the HDD. Well, when we went to do so, we discovered it was already installed. Didn't make a difference, obviously.

After a while's worth of troubleshooting, which included swapping out official HDDs from our collection, and eventually running the system without any HDD attached (at which point it ran beautifully), we determined that there's probably something wrong with the hard drive port on the Xbox 360 itself. The HDDs don't exhibit these issues when placed in other systems, yet they all do it when set inside of this one. Really, the 360 does all sorts of scrambled things, like reading game discs as DVDs and so on.

Now, how could I go about replacing the HDD interface on the Xbox 360 system itself? I haven't been able to locate this part, but if anyone can recommend a good Xbox 360 spare parts website which carries it, I would greatly appreciate it. Also, if anyone has any other ideas, I would appreciate them, too.

Thanks in advance.

 

[FAST6191]

First it might just be dirt on the contacts- upturned canned air/nail polish remover and/or the usual stuff you use to clean contacts might be in order.

I am not aware of any spare parts sites that do this ( https://secure.llamma.com/catalog/index.php?cPath=73_86 is fairly representative) but you can usually pick up a dead RRoD 360 for shipping and not much more from which you can desolder the part.
Equally you might wish to take a leaf from the book of the hard drive hacking/JTAG community and bypass the port entirely and just wire it up like a full sata drive ( http://www.xblog-360.com/forum/showthread.php?t=250 )- bonus is you do not have to fiddle around finding 12V and you can also mess with hard drives on a PC without too much hassle.

If it is the underlying hard drive controller (I am not sure which chip that would be either) I would not be inclined to try fixing it.

Possible alternative in the meantime- if your USB ports still hold up MS added the option of up to 16 gigs of USB drive this time last year. No hard drive installs but everything else should hold.

 

[RazMasters]

For a thorough response like that, you deserve to have Rotor as your avatar. Thank you kindly.