A New Challenge and New Headaches:
Welcome, Co-conspirators, The Stratagem’s Archives are now open for perusing. Today, I learned, after HOURS of searching through so much YouTube videos, I have fixed an Xbox 360 with something I’ve never experienced before: An error code, E68.
Last night my boss at my rage room job received an Xbox 360 in great condition from a customer who said that it was broken. A coworker tested it out on our job’s TV to see what it looked like and it looked like this:
The power bank light is green, the power on the system itself is red, and the screen shows an error message on my TV. I had spent, I’m not sure how long, looking for solutions to fix this Xbox. I turned it off, laid it on its side, turned it back on, only to have the same message appear because most of the advice from over 10 years ago showed this did fix their systems. It didn’t work for this one…
Then, after reading through the comment section from this one YouTube video by “Huzaifa Techincal Guru”, it is when I finally found out the reason for the error code for this Xbox. Now, my Xbox (right of one in video) is fully functioning after all these years when I realized I put the AV cords into the wrong ports of my LG TV. So, I figured, something is causing this other console to act up.
That’s when the video asks that I take it apart. Not apart to it’s minuscule component, rather to get to it’s hard drive.
If you can’t spot something different about this vent, then I’ll point it out that the vent looks different where I circled in red. There’s a gap in this vent. That’s where the hard drive is. I was mind blown when I learned those 3 vents were a button to open that hatch!
Once you have the cover off, you will see something with a small piece of fabric sticking out now. That is the hard drive. From my understanding, it is not for extra memory, rather it is used to play first generation Xbox games on this second generation system. It makes it backwards compatible and able to function as though it is the original system.
Once you remove this hard drive, as far as the error code E68 goes, this is what happened.
The Xbox starts to function and the error code is gone! Apparently, as far as this experience went, E68 occurs if the hard drive is malfunctioning. You technically don’t need it.
The Xbox 360 has it’s own internal memory, unless you want to play games that require more memory or you have a lot of game profiles, the best solution is to remove the current malfunctioning hard drive and get a new one. Else, it’s really not needed and works fine without it.
One System Has Been Saved!
After trying to figure out what was wrong with this system, I felt dumb because the solution was so simple – I didn’t have to open the entire system open, I would have broken it for real because I don’t know what to do, then my boss could sell this at work to break. Some people get ecstatic when they get to break a gaming system not theirs. I was so happy because I told them I was going to fix it, with no prior electronics experience AT ALL, and I did!
Now, my job can do what they want with this system, but I figured that, since it works, we could put it to use than break it when can still be used to play on. The customer that dropped it off also gave the remote controllers and the Kinect system too. All we’d need would be batteries and a few multiplayer games, then we’d be set!
I’m glad that I was able to figure out how to fix this system, I didn’t want to give up on it until I went through every option possible. Now the Xbox 360 will have multiple error codes appear, but I am thankful I was able to solve one of those error codes today and not resort to watching a system get utterly destroyed.
I’m biased because I’m a long time gamer; been playing since my dad showed me his PlayStation 1 console playing “Resident Evil, Resident Evil: Nemesis, Frogger, Tomb Raider, Mortal Kombat and other games. Then we got the PS2, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Nintendo DS, Nintendo 3DS, PSP, and PSVita. I haven’t gotten any new systems in forever, but that’s for later.
Anyways, I just wanted to share something new I learned and, if your Xbox 360 having the same issues that you want to keep and is fully functional, maybe this might help. Let me know in the comments, what technical issues you had to deal with and how did you fix it? I’m curious to know what kind of electronic mis-adventures you’ve all had, especially if you have no idea what you were doing, but fixed it somehow.
Until next time, Co-conspirators, The Archives will now be closing. Until we open again!
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