podger over at xbox-scene and xboxhacker has just made it quite a bit easier on anybody looking to modify their Hitachi 79 drive. He has developed a method and application for flashing a Hitachi 79 without soldering and without opening up the drive at all.

You can read the thread here. Please note that this thread is in the technical forums over there, so please do not post in that thread asking stupid questions.

You can download 79 Unlock in our downloads section : http://www.360mods.net/Downloads/details/id=87.html

Quote:

Tutorial:
1. Unrar the file
2. Burn the Image.cue file with a compatible burning software, I used ImgBurn….

3. Put 79 in Mode B
3. Insert the CD in the 79 and play the track, wait for it to finish…
4. Then press play again and straight away pause it, you should hear some noise
5. Eject the disk, using the eject button not the PC ( it does something different)
6. Run the the command in a command window
79Unlock h
// where h is the drive letter of the 79
// this will error regardless, ignore the error

7. If all went well bit 4 of (0x5BD) should be set and the drive should be unlocked
8. Drive will dump and flash with Toolbox…
9. This is a tempory unlock, (0x5BD) is in RAM and would need to be done each time you power the drive, although I've posted how to by pass this with the drive unlocked with a passkey…..

10. Has not been extensively tested but worked on 6 drives to day so far…

Note: If using the Xbox 360 to power the drive, remember to have the video cable plugged in or the system will power off after about 5 minutes. This must be a component or composite video cable. HDMI has no hardware detection, and because of this, the system will power off even with an HDMI cable plugged in.

For anybody who has been unlucky and landed themselves a LiteOn drive, here is a little tease from c4eva himself.

Quote:

c4eva: i have found some things that are not yet known about the lite-on, it will be done!