My Xbox crapped out on me, but it's an original one, not a 360. I accidentally dropped my backpack on top of it while it had a lot of really heavy crap on it, and I think it knocked something loose. When the system boots, it makes the normal "whir" for like 2 or 3 seconds, then there's a sort of clicking sound coming from the inside. The splash screen that comes on every time you start the console goes through its little motion, and then it gets to the part where it's just the Xbox logo on the screen. At this point, if you have a game in, the Microsoft logo usually appears below the Xbox logo. This never happens.
The Xbox logo sits on the screen while the console goes through its little clicking deal, and then after about 15 seconds the logo disappears and the screen gives me an error message which says, "Service required. Contact Customer Support." So, I called Customer Support, which turned out to be pretty useless. I used the automatic thing at first and didn't get an answer that was useful to me, so I tried actually talking to a representative... at four it in the morning. :x
He was useless. Just some money-grubbing foreign guy who kept telling me the same thing over and over, not even understanding what my problem was. He kept telling me that I should send it to the factory in Texas and have them look at it for $80, and they'd either fix it or give me a new one. For $80 bucks, I'd just wait and get a 360 in a few months.
Anyway, as it turns out, I never registered the console, and even if I had, it would've been expired by then, so I figured it couldn't get any worse and opened up the console. Everything seems normal enough, but something's definitely wrong with the hard drive. If we unplug the hard drive, it just freezes on the Xbox splash screen, but it doesn't make the clicking. I figured since it's already busted, I should just go ahead and mod it, but that requires some kind of chips or something... I'm not even going to go into all of that.
Is there any way of fixing it short of modding it? I don't even know if this is possible, but maybe pirating the Xbox OS onto a new hard drive and swapping it for the old one?