Massive Xbox 360 problem. Please help.

[Jeeba Jabba]

So, I finally got a HDTV. And I've been using HDMI for my 360. Well, the other day, when waking up, and watching a movie I noticed the color and overall picture quality beginning to fail. Almost like a Photoshop filter. Then it stopped wanting to boot up with any picture whatsoever. Tried using the other blue, green, and red HD cables, and nothing at all. Tried other HDMI ports. Nothing. And at one point it flashed the red ring of death, but only for a moment.

But yeah, I was so excited about finally being able to play in HD, and now this. Can anyone tell me what's wrong with my Xbox? A friend told me he had a similar problem, and that it will only play with the regular red, white, and yellow AV cables.


Pretty annoyed.

[Eviltaco64X]

No way.
This is EXACTLY what happened to my Xbox 360 twice.
All I had to do was wrap it up in a blanket until it overheated.
It seems to resolder something, and I cant complain, it fixed the no video thing twice.

Of course, doing that COULD give you the RRoD (that you could either fix yourself or send back to MS)

[Skynet]

Something like that happened to mine, it's a launch console. This was a few years ago, sent it back to MS. Not sure what the cause of the problem was though.

[Jeeba Jabba]

No way.
This is EXACTLY what happened to my Xbox 360 twice.
All I had to do was wrap it up in a blanket until it overheated.
It seems to resolder something, and I cant complain, it fixed the no video thing twice.

Of course, doing that COULD give you the RRoD (that you could either fix yourself or send back to MS)

How long should it take to overheat?

[Eviltaco64X]

No way.
This is EXACTLY what happened to my Xbox 360 twice.
All I had to do was wrap it up in a blanket until it overheated.
It seems to resolder something, and I cant complain, it fixed the no video thing twice.

Of course, doing that COULD give you the RRoD (that you could either fix yourself or send back to MS)

How long should it take to overheat?

If you wrap it up properly with a towel, blanket, etc, it should take about 15 minutes.
It'll get really hot, you'll hear the fans going a lot faster, and once it overheats it flashes two red rings. Id leave it on for another minute, turn it off, let it cool down, and see if its a success.

Like I said it worked for me twice! Also, if you get the RRoD and dont want to depend on Microsoft, might I recommend the penny fix?

[Caboose]

Don't void your warranty unless it is already gone. The towel trick will at best only prolong the inevitable (red rings). The each time you do the towel trick, it will be harder to do next time. If you're not getting the 3 red lights on a regular basis yet, then by all means go ahead with the towel to get whatever use you can out of the unit before it goes kaput.

If your warranty is already expired though (and I mean sticker removed/cut), probably the best course of action would be to do the x-clamp fix and put some new thermal paste on the gpu/cpu. This will help straighten up the warped mobo (which is the root of all evil with xbox 360 hardware problems), and you should also try putting rubber or pennies (as was suggested) under the corners of the motherboard and there are 4 (IIRC) memory chips that get extremely hot, if you put some under there it wouldn't hurt either.

Good luck,

-Cab

[melancholy]

Just out of curiosity, why does the RRoD occur? I remember Microsoft saying it was an inherent flaw in every 360, but what is that flaw?

[Caboose]

Just out of curiosity, why does the RRoD occur? I remember Microsoft saying it was an inherent flaw in every 360, but what is that flaw?

warped mobo (which is the root of all evil with xbox 360 hardware problems)

The excessive heat it generates causes the motherboard to warp, made worse by the shitty clamps they put on to hold on the heatsinks which put all the pressure in one place instead of distributing it evenly.

[Ex-Cyber]

Supposedly corners were cut in the whole production/test engineering process for 360, and there is no single flaw that is to blame. In addition to the motherboard warping issue, evidence has been shown that the soldering process was probably messed up somehow (rumored to be a mismatch between the BGA balls and solder paste).

[Jeeba Jabba]

I overheated it and it worked. Thanks a lot guys.