Microsoft released the Xbox series of consoles. My guess is that these are decent game machines. They seem to be designed well and the self-documentation as well as community documentation is pretty good. In contrast, if you remember back to the Xbox 360 days with the overheating issues and the red ring of death and the fact that Microsoft took a huge hit repairing/replacing them (multiple times sometimes) you’ll acknowledge that they spent a great deal of money — and in the end they didn’t show their competence.
Microsoft protects their systems from hacks. Meaning they try to lock them down so that users can’t hack them and make them do things that they weren’t supposed to do. We all can understand the desire to ensure that gamers don’t cheat. There are a ton of cheaters and there’s little you can do about it personally. Locking these down to keep them from running some other OS is shortsighted. When we buy these devices we own the hardware, and when their end of life comes as a game console then we should be allowed to modify it to be used for something else. An example would be to turn it into a media center. Another example would be to use it as a Linux machine?
The other day I bought a used Xbox One S from the goodwill for $12.99. Turning it on resulted in a black screen. My original thought was that the HDMI retimer chip was bad and that’d I’d need to do some repairs, such as I would use my hot air soldering station to remove and replace the chip. Rather than immediately draw that conclusion I decided to just leave the console on and plugged into the HDMI port. After a short while I noticed that displayed on the TV was a message indicating that something went wrong.
Being that the time it took to bring this up was lengthy, and the fact that it finally did display a message on the TV I concluded that the issue was a hard drive problem. I unplugged it to take it home. When I got home I took it apart. The drive is relatively easy to get at. To test it I pulled the old drive and plugged it into a computer in an effort to see if the computer recognized the drive. This confirmed that the drive was the issue.
I noted that the drive was a Seagate. If you didn’t know this, Seagate has a horrible reputation with drive reliability in the consumer market. The main issue is that they are intolerant to heat. Years ago Maxtor was failing as a company, yet somehow they managed to buy Seagate. To reduce the detractors they changed their name to Seagate and began producing drives based on primarily their technology, and likely some of Seagate’s. Anyway, this was a downhill thing. Suppliers of cloud based services have done numerous reviews on the stability of drives, of drives in general. Seagate has proven this terrible reputation in that market space.
So…
I went and grabbed another drive from an infrequently used computer and tried to get the software installed onto it. At first I tried a 480gb SSD. As I didn’t really know, because it was poorly documented through the web, what to expect, this didn’t solve the problem. I had to try all kinds of different things. First, I followed the Microsoft guidance and downloaded the update and tried to get that to work. No luck. I told my friend who was helping that likely they wanted the drive setup from scratch. Since nothing else worked he and I took this course of action.
When we were trying different things we looked for and found guides, albeit incomplete and nearly incompetent sets of steps authored by numerous youtube video bloggers. To be fair maybe Microsoft changed how things were to be done to reinstall a new drive. I read at least one post indicating that replacing the drive on your own is a violation of Microsoft’s terms. Either way there were so many guides, so many people authoritatively documenting the “correct procedure” that you couldn’t help but get lost in it all.
No one seems to understand the process (except for a few). As I said the guides are so riddled with errors that no one can reliably get their unit back up and running without finding the perfect guide. I can’t begin to tell you the number of guides that were totally wrong and the number of threads where people were exceptionally dumb in their response to other’s questions.
We came across a guide that tells you to partition and format your new drive using the partitioning scheme and name of the partitions and to download and copy to the drive certain files after creating folders in the update partition. This option fails giving you a miserable feeling as it seems nothing will promote the progress you wanted to see. In this case, you get to the point where it goes through a 3 stage process and then fails at the beginning of the 2nd stage (verifying).
Because one guide indicated that the issue was the fact that we were using a 480gb rather than a true 500gb drive, we had to backtrack and chose a different drive. I grabbed a 1tb SSD and ran through the process again — which failed.
It was getting late and though we found another guide we stopped for the evening and I went to bed.
In the morning my friend chatted me indicating that he’d been working on it and made progress past the 1% of stage 2. After this all completed the console rebooted and displayed the user setup for the console. Apparently it worked. When all was done my friend stated that the guide that we were using was pointless. What he needed to do was wipe the SSD (removing all of those custom partitions, wiping it completely of all partitions). This blank drive was plugged into the console and the USB that held the extracted contents of the OSU1 update was inserted into the USB port. The console was shut off and then turned on while holding the eject button, the power button and one other button (sorry can’t remember the name of it). It chimed twice and the console came up into recovery mode (if you will). After this the progress indicator of the three stages was presented. He watched the progress until it got well into stage 2 before he chatted me. This went on and finished, rebooted and then walked us through the console and account setup.
It’s disappointing that so many people try to write guides where they fall flat and/or where they fail to update their guides and videos for changes to how the recovery process works on these consoles.
Microsoft kept saying in their troubleshooting guide to try x and y and when those fail take the console in for repair. That’s it. There was never anything of substance to aid in resolving the console issues. It seems that they were more interested in making more money from selling you a replacement drive (likely another Seagate) than they were at getting your console back up and running.
This rant here isn’t meant to be a guide. I think that if you were to take anything away from it as far as what it takes to resolve your issue is that we didn’t need to prepare the drive in advance, that we put it in without partitions, and that the flash stick was literally just an ntfs formatted 16gb drive with the OSU1 files extracted onto it. Microsoft could have explained it that way if that is all that was necessary to do the recovery. So many people wouldn’t have to suffer the pain of trying to get their consoles back up and running.