Thats right everyone.

Were you an idiot when you were trying to flash firmware on your DVD drive and you didnt read the key or save the key before hand?

Did you buy an xbox off of Ebay and see that the dvd drive was swapped, only to find that your key is gone?

Do you have an xbox without a dvd drive and want to put one in?

Or do you have a xbox that you know is nothing more than a mere 150 dollar Paperweight?

Well....

There is finally a solution for you guys.

See microsoft did do one thing smart. Updating their disc format and putting new firmware on your DVD drive so that you cant play burned games (not for long though.) Im not saying that the burned games part is good but the fact that they are re writing the firmware on your drive.

Now if you signed up for the xbox live beta testing program, you got the beta dashboard with the new firmware on a disc. This is the best part if you have the disc already.

"Oh shit Mastershake, I wasn't a part of the beta program. What do i do"?

Well sir, you are in luck. Because In the link below, Is all the files you need in a folder that you simply just put on a USB drive and plug on in to your console.

The following screen will pop up when you restart your xbox with the usb drive inserted:

" Blah,Blah,Blah,Sevensins Sucks, Blah Blah Blah, There is an update do you wish to continue."

So this is the part where you go ahead and click this.

NOTE: YOU MUST HAVE YOUR DVD DRIVE PLUGGED IN.

How this works:

Microsoft has an image built of the newest firmware that they want to write to your drive. But they are missing the one important thing: Your dvd key. Now what they are going to do is read it from the nand and write over any kind of firmware that is on the drive already.
If you dont believe me, open up the dash.xex in IDA Pro and look at the bottom of the code where it commands to read from flash memory 256 (Depending on which motherboard you have, essentially.) and this spoofs it to your drive.

Now you have a fully working xbox again that you can play all your games on.

Now for you guys that have IXtreme and dont wanna loose it..

All is your going to do is when you put in the disc, or usb, when it says to update, your going to unplug the SATA cables to your disc drive. This will allow you to bypass the firmware update and continue to run your burned games on the 2.0.13412.0 Dashboard.

Don't forget to thank the topic, this took me alot of trial and error to get this right.

+rep is always appreciated.

Here is the link for the dashboard and firmware files:
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There is also videos of how to update as well on there for you nubs out there.

Peace!

Mastershake.