I feel like an idiot.

That was Friday. It took me about 2 months (between order parts and re-ordering parts because the original supplier didn't ship part of the order), but on Thursday I finished doing a hard mod of Jody's XBox. Yeah for me.

I had to stay in town because I was going to do some house planning with my mom and race in Moncton on Sunday, so I asked Jody if he wanted to come over for the weekend (and then he could pick up his XBox as well). When it was obvious he wasn't coming over, I had a stupid idea. Seeing that I have a working modchip laying around the house, I could bororrow the chip and finish the XBox harddrive swap I've been meaning to do. It actually sounded pretty good at the time.

Long story short: I fragged the modchip. I locked the replacement drive I was going to use so now it's a 40 GB paperweight. I spent 12 hours trying to resurrect the chip, reverified solder points, wire connections, resoldered a broken connector several times, resoldered the chip a few times, reflashed the modchip BIOS. . . By 6:00 am and the sun coming back up I pronounced the chip dead and I ordered another chip.

When I woke up later that morning, I had another great idea. Assuming I didn't completely destroy the chip, I might be able to salvage it by using an alternate connection method. Spent the rest of the weekend on it. Final result: 1 Softmodded Xbox with a modchip and larger harddrive. Another XBox partially modded and missing a chip. I'm currently out of pocket for an additional modchip, cost of a 160 GB harddrive, GBA flash cart, a harddrive turned 40 GB paperweight, lots of sleep, and an entire weekend. Good news, I did successfully salvage everything. Bad news, that was a waste of a weekend.