Attempting to Fix A “Broken” Xbox 360
I had no idea what I was doing, but I somehow fixed an Xbox 360 with a mysterious E68 error code — and I did it with zero prior electronics experience. The console wouldn’t turn on properly, and every old YouTube guide I tried failed.
After hours of testing, poking around, and stubbornly refusing to give up, I discovered the culprit: a small removable hard drive that was malfunctioning. One vent, one hatch, and a lot of trial-and-error later, the Xbox is fully functional again.
In this post, I’ll walk you through exactly what I did to solve the E68 error, what I learned about the console’s hardware, and why you might not even need that hard drive to get your system working.
If your Xbox 360 is acting up and no guide seems to help, this could save you time, frustration, and maybe even a trip to a repair shop or GameStop.
Let’s Get Tech Savvy as a Very Stubborn Person
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”.
I own a 360 myself, and, since a lot of consoles are expensive as shit, I hated how a perfectly good looking system was going to be sold to be smashed to bits.
A coworker wanted to see what made it broken and 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, though the power on the system itself is red, and the screen shows an error message on my TV. I had spent about over an hour 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. Most of the advice I found was from over 10 years ago and it showed those advice 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.
This “Broken” Xbox 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.
A Little Time and Stubbornness Shown Through To Get This Fixed
Anyways, I just wanted to share what I learned and, if your Xbox 360 is 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!
If You Made It To The End
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