How To: Flash BenQ Xbox 360 Drives to Play XDG3 Back-ups

Gamers who have their Xbox 360's firmware flashed may have recently noticed an inability to play backups, or even make backups of newer games that have come out: Gears of War 3 and Dead Island, to name a few.

This is because Microsoft has come out with a new disc format to fight piracy, called XDG3. This burns an extra gigabyte of data to the inner-ring of the dual-layer DVD, which is not burnable with commercial disc burners. So HOW on earth can we burn our fully-legal back-ups that we should rightfully be able to have? Well, last night (October 9th, 2011) c4eva and the good people at iExtreme released the iExtreme LT+ 2.0 firmware, which allows you to play XDG3 games, and back-ups! It allows the same data to be read from normal dual-layer DVDs, even if they are written to different sectors of the disc.

This was released last night, so you guys saw it here first at Power Byte. I'm going to show you how to flash the latest and greatest iExtreme to BenQ DVD drives. You can see if you have a BenQ drive by following this tutorial on llama.

Warnings

• This tutorial is not condoning piracy. This allows you to burn your back-ups of games, which is fully legal.
• Do this at your own risk—you may "brick" your drive, rendering it unusable in some cases.
• You may become banned from Xbox Live if you do this. To make your chances of being banned nearly impossible, follow my tips at the end of this guide. With that said, you are still taking a risk.

What You Need

• Torx 8 and Torx 10 screw drivers.
• A small precision flat-head screwdrive, to pry the casing off.
• A PCIe SATA card with a VIA6421a chipset. You can find them on Ebay for $10. Just search "via6421a".

Step 1 Taking Apart Your Xbox 360 & Preparation

1. Follow this guide from llama to take apart your Xbox 360.
2. Install your VIA6421a card in your computer with a SATA cable ready to be plugged into your BenQ's SATA port.
3. Leave the white-tipped power cable plugged into the 360, you'll need that to power the drive. Unless you want to buy a CK3 connectivity kit.
4. Make sure that there isn't a disc in the drive when flashing. This can lead to a bricked drive.
5. Turn on the 360.
6. Download this package. It contains Jungle Flasher, which is a tool to flash all 360 drives, and the latest firmware.
7. Extract the folder to your Desktop, navigate inside the folder, and right-click the Jungle Flasher executable.

Step 2 Flashing the Drive

After that is all set, follow me in this guide to flash the drive's firmware.

That's it! Power off the Xbox 360 and throw in a burned back-up game and you should see it read the game normally!

Staying Safe on Xbox Live

• Whenever there is a system update (not a game update), reflash your drive back to the stock firmware that you saved. Connect to Xbox Live, do the system update, then reflash it.
• Don't tell anyone you have a flashed DVD drive. Microsoft is always listening.
• Always stealth patch your games before you burn them.