How to fix a burnt Eject button on the XBOX

[Harlequin]

Hey guys,

A while ago I was building a new DVD rom for my brother's xbox. His was failing and just didn't function anymore. Stupidly, I forgot to add the 1k resistor on the eject line and after a few minutes of testing, i could smell the burning smell of an electrical fire. One PC DVD rom shot. Oh well, no big loss.

So I moved on and went about putting his original DVD drive back in. It wouldn't eject either. Tried a few more DVD roms and none of them worked. Cringe.

I figured that the Eject Pin itself had burnt along with the rest of the connecting lines and told him his DVD slot would likely never work again. Key word is likely. I did manage to fix this, so it has a happy ending.

From my experience the PC DVD to xbox modders back in the day didn't get that the DVD connecting header had N_EJECT as a signal; they often would wire eject directly to the front panel. Strangely, they each put a different value of resistor on the line. For those of you who may be attempting this, the point we are talking about is the back panel of the physical eject button on the xbox. You can see it from inside the case, there are four points, two on the top and two on the bottom. We are talking about the top Right point. I don't know what kind of a resistor value is "correct", but some have used 5k, some 3.3k, and I believe others used lower than that. Since I didn't have either of those, I used 4 1k 1/4 watt resistors in series. I put these on pretty close to the DVD eject button and wrapped them in electrical tape so they sit just above the controller port. I brought the wire around the side of the xbox and taped it off pretty close to the DVD connector. I then looked up a diagram of the DVD connector head (motherboard side) and found the N_EJECT signal line. if you are looking down at the xbox and the front of the box is facing you, it is second from the back on the left hand side. Use a diagram to feel more comfortable with what you are looking at.

I then pulled the wire and clamp directly out of the DVD connector cable, and connected it to the end of my wire that was wrapping around. This way the connector head can be re-built in the future, and the whole assembly can be disconnected if I need to take the mobo out of this box. It did work, I could eject again and everything was happy. I tried the original DVD drive of death again, and it suddenly all stopped working. This morning I replaced the resisters and can report that it is now working again. Lesson learned is that if your DVD drive is not ejecting dont try hitting eject a bunch to make it work. It's just going to burn whatever resistors are on the board. I'm going to now connect the box to a known good DVD drive and see if it can read data as well as eject.. and it does appear to work... so maybe next time around I would only use 3 resistors as it sometimes doesn't seem to "get" that I have hit the eject button, but if I give it a few seconds it figures it out... hope this helps someone, feel free to post questions or comments (and I know pics would have been better)