Taking Apart an Xbox 360 (Phat edition)

Recently, our old Xbox 360 had issues with the disc drive constantly opening after closing and sometimes not even opening without unnecessary force on the drive. I was able to find a guide on how to take apart my Xbox on iFixit. Unfortunately, when I was taking apart the Xbox, a piece snapped off as the entire outside shell was just snapped together with clips. After taking off the exterior body, I unscrewed about fifteen screws holding the final aluminum shell together.

Once I got it completely taken apart, I unplugged the cables connected to the disk drive, then I was able to just quickly pull out the drive. There was a LOT of dust. I then got an air compressor and wholly cleared all of the dust out of the inside components. Since this particular Xbox is now about 15 years old. I then took the outer plastic shell pieces and washed them with soapy water in a bucket. Since there was a couple of Gamestop stickers and it was partially yellow.

I also looked up the motherboard type since the “red ring of death” was very common to these Xbox 360s. The red ring of death was a widespread error code that would involve the motherboard or another hardware piece inside the Xbox to fail, and they’re mainly was not an easy fix (more about it here). And any of the motherboards made from 2005-2008 were most likely going to have that issue. But I found out that the model motherboard we had was called “Jasper” (thanks to this helpful website: weekendmodder). This meant the board was from when Microsoft mostly fixed all of the problems and had a rare chance of getting the red ring of death. Since it was manufactured in the years 2009 to 2010.

I cleaned out the disk tray entirely and found that the most common issue would be fixed by cleaning a rubber pulley. Because the motor wasn’t powerful and the pulley would get dirty and not turn the gears far enough, which would result in the disk tray getting confused about why it wasn’t closing. Once I had cleaned the gears and washed the rubber band, I put it all back together and powered the Xbox back on. And it started opening and closing again! I tested it thoroughly before screwing the drive back into place into the Xbox.

I also upgraded another part of the Xbox, which I am working on. There will probably be another blog post on it when I have finished.