It seems that the last update that Microsoft pushed is causing the newer games not to play on my Xbox360. You know, to play my saved games and stuff. I needed to get the 1.61 update of the iExtreme software for BenQ drives, but I ran into a bit of trouble trying to get it to work.  The previous flashing I did went off without a hitch and I assumed this would as well. Wrong.

First of all, I had issues with iPrep making a bootable USB drive. It would say that it would finish the flashing and then I would get a “INVALID BOOT DEVICE” error when it would attempt to boot. I thought maybe it was the USB device I was using that may not support booting.  When I am flashing my drive, I always disconnect all of the SATA/IDE components, so I knew it wasn’t trying to boot from another device. I also knew that it was making it to the USB drive because the activity light on the stick would come on. I had even tried a couple different USB sticks without a change.

So how did I fix this issue? I tried iPrep on my laptop using the same files and it was bootable with no problems. That was it. Why it wouldn’t work from my PC I have no clue. Honestly, I didn’t really care either. Just as long it was bootable.

The last update I did was using the iPrep 101 version I got off from the xbins irc. Installed it. Pushed it to my USB drive. Worked wonderfully. I loved that version of iPrep because during the flashing process, it would cycle the available SATA/IDE devices searching for the port the Xbox360 was on. At least, I could tell it which port to use during the process. The newest version of iPrep 101 (v11.6), which I downloaded to remedy a definitions issue, did not give me an option to cycle through the ports when I ran the flashing process. Unfortunately, it did not default to the SATA port on my VIA card. I guess it needed this during the flashing process? Trying to find the right version of iPrep and the right definitions is like a treasure hunt.

This little configuration issue with the update to iPrep made it so that there was no way to read from the card I needed to have it read from. I don’t know why I couldn’t get it to read from the iPrep interface, but I had to update a file manually within the USB stick that pointed specifically to the port on the correct card. Going from memory, there was a file called “options.bat” or something that I needed to update to the appropriate port setting. The ONLY reason I knew what port it was that I was suppose to use was because of someone was using the same type of card (VIA 6421) I was using and I was able to get it to work. I’m sure I could have Googled the appropriate way to get he port information, but your on your own if you need to locate this.

Wow. What a pain it was to get the latest flash. I thought it was suppose to be easier as you go along?