This thread is for anyone who wants to mod their Xbox 360 by flashing its DVD drive with hacked firmware, or anyone who has already had this done but wants to keep up to date with the releases of hacked firmware to take advantage of new features as they develop and minimise the chances of being banned from Xbox Live.

Update - 15/5/09 - Updated with iXtreme 1.6 for Samsung, Benq and Liteon drives. Hitachi to follow at a later (unspecified) date. Liteon firmware is the repack (first release had a slight problem :wink: )

Update - 13/08/09 - JungleFlasher v0.1.65 Beta and DOS Flash 1.8 added.

Latest tools for flashing have also been provided. As always, read the tutorials and instructions before doing anything, even if you've flashed before, just in case anything has changed.



First of all, general tutorials on flashing - what you need, how to do it, etc. If you're new to this, read these thoroughly before you do anything else.

Introductory Tutorials (Please note - given the changes and new software available with iXtreme 1.5, these original tutorials may now be out of date. However I am leaving the link posted here for reference because the information may still be useful as the general principles still apply and it's still relevant for flashing older firmware or working with older drives.)

Flashing LiteOn drives using VIA SATA chipsets tutorial
JungleFlasher User Guide
A tutorial for flashing any kind of Xbox 360 DVD drive using JungleFlasher. Not the simplest or easiest way for some drives (DOS is better for Samsung and Benq), but essential for Liteon drives.



Without further ado - the firmware files themselves:

iXtreme 1.6 bundle (for Samsung, Benq and Liteon drives):
iXtreme 1.6 for Samsung drives:
iXtreme 1.6 for Benq drives:
iXtreme 1.6 for Liteon drives:
iXtreme 1.51 for ALL drives (latest version for Hitachi):

And the tools needed to flash your drive:

JungleFlasher v0.1.65 Beta (a much improved version of this new tool, which does pretty much everything for you!)
DOS Flash 1.8 (includes x64 version!)
Firmware Toolbox 4.8 (For flashing Hitachi drives in Windows. Also does general management and reading of firmware files, including spoofing and key changing.)
iPrep v008.8 (for Samsung, BenQ and Liteon drives, used to prepare boot disks according to your SATA chipset)
And iXtreme 1.6 definition files for iPrep (so that it recognises the iXtreme firmware as valid)
Boot disk files for flashing Samsung and BenQ drives (Custom made by myself, a slight variation on the files created by iPrep so you can just use this instead of iPrep. Copy the files to a bootable USB drive to read firmware, copy key to new firmware and flash new firmware, and keep backups of everything along the way! Text appears on screen to talk you through every step of the process.)
Slax Boot Disk 2.1 (For flashing Hitachi drives. Used to get the drives into ModeB so they can be detected by Windows)
79 Unlock (for Hitachi 79 drives)
Getting a Hitachi 79 drive into ModeB isn't enough - you still won't be able to read the firmware until you unlock the drive. You used to need to install a modchip for this, but now there's a software solution.
FirmTool v1.3
DOS Flash v1.7
DVDKey32 v0.7


And some other useful programs -

abgx360 v1.0.1 (A newer tool for ensuring that ISO files are stealth patched and iXtreme compatible, and patching them if they aren't)
XDVDMulleter Beta 10.2 (For ensuring that ISO files are properly stealth patched and iXtreme compatible. Also for adding security sectors to stealth patch ISO files and creating .dvd files to set the correct layer break sector.)

Hope this is useful to some people. If it will be appreciated I'll keep everything up to date when new versions come out and will add other useful things. I'll also try to answer any questions!