Tom came over last night and we flashed our XBoX 360s with the xtrem42b rev 1 firmware.

Here’s what we did
1: Disassemble the XBoX, via the anandtech guide. We first tried the plastic spindle method, but that didn’t work so I used a thin flathead screw driver to push in the slots.
2: Find out what drive and firmware is on the drive. For each of ours, we had the Toshiba-Samsung TS-H943 drive with the ms28 firmware (June 2006).
3: Copy the original firmware from the drive to a safe location, with “mtkflash r /m /sata orig.bin”. I was about to do this from a bootable floppy.
4: Grab the key and put it into the hacked firmware. It involved going to 0×4000 of orig.bin, copying 0×400 values, and putting them at 0×4000 of the hacked.bin.
5: Write the hacked.bin back to the DVD drive.

At first I skipped step 4, the flashing froze and when I turned on the 360 it should E 65 on the TV screen. From this point, it took me about an hour to get the original firmware back on the DVD drive, using the bad flash recovery method and a mix of 10 second delay and no delay for turning it on.

Once the original was back on, we made sure to do step 4, then used a bootable CD (using NTFS DOS) instead of the bootable floppy, because apparently the floppy often has the freezing problem.

Once the hacked firmware was on the 360, we plugged it in and tested, and it worked!

Hoo-rah!