Xbox death and replacement media center?
My Xbox has died. To be fair, it's not quite dead yet but it's clearly pining for the fjords. Last night greeted me with a Red Ring of Death, and an error message that seems to translate to "9 - kernel - HDD parameters (PIO/DMA/or size {debug}, certain size minimum is required for debug)". It also makes the classing "Your hard drive has died a horrible death" clicking sounds, so I think it's pretty fair to guess that the HDD has now turned into a brick whos metabolic processes are a matter of interest only to historians.
My immediate response was to try and replace the HDD myself, given that I have a few older ones I've kept lying around but it seems that the error persists. I'll try again tomorrow with another driver, but I doubt that it'll help. The Xbox behaves the exact way if I try to boot it without the hard drive as well.
I'm not all that worried that the Xbox itself seems to have ceased to be (although I'm pretty sure my son will strongly disagree). My worry is that I'm left without any kind of media center setup in my living room. My primary use of the Xbox was XBMC, playing media files over the local home network.
In the unlikely event that I get the Xbox working again, I'll continue to use it, but I think I need some kind of contingency plan. Ideally I would purchase a completely new HTPC setup and start from scratch with that, but given that I'm on a pretty strict budget here, purchasing new hardware is pretty much out of the question at this point.
So what should I do? I have access to a couple of decent IBM ThinkPad laptops I could use as a simple media center solution. But then the question is what software should I run on it? Windows? Linux? XBMC for Linux/Windows? LinuxMCE? MediaPortal? MythTV? Something completely different?
What I need is a solution that can play my media files over the network from the shared resources I have. XBMC has served me very well on the Xbox, so perhaps just running it on Windows would be the best option I have (besides getting the Xbox working again)?
All suggestions are welcome, both for resolving the Xbox issue or advice on what solution I should be looking for as a replacement media center.
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Published June 18, 2008 22:10
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Tagged with LinuxMCE, media center, MediaPortal, MythTV, XBMC and xbox
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June 22, 2008 11:33am
What’s really odd is that my XBox just died on me, too. Seven years old, lived through a Coma Console repair. Now I’ve got the multi-language “Your XBox requires service” screen with no error number, and it won’t boot into the dashboard or any games/movies.
It happened all of a sudden when I stopped a movie that was playing and inserted a new one. The only odd thing about it is that the new one was a PAL movie, not NTSC. But I’ve played those numerous times without issue.
I called XBox support, and they said “For the low price of $80 plus shipping…” they’d repair it or give me a new one if they couldn’t. Sadly, I’ve cracked the case (obviously) to do the CC repair, so there’s no way it would be serviceable.