The past 12 hours microsoft has unleashed a new wave of bans on modified xbox 360 consoles.
Since the drives need to be in “recovery mode” to dump the firmware, there is no evidence that they are checking the firmware itself. Also, live logs on our drives have shown that the firmware is doing its job, however, there are checks being done on the media itself.
Some possible causes of this wave of bans that we are still investigating are:
The “proper” scene release of games has a bad sector on it that MS can detect
The disc media is not reporting the sizes correctly do to poor quality of media
The disc read speed of the media is being compromised either by multi speed firmwares or the PFI on the disc that contains data how fast the disc was burned and is to be read. If MS reads the PFI and sees the drive is not spinning as fast or slow as it should, this information could be reporting a modified firmware.
It appears that modified fw is NOT being detected, and is instead once again due to ‘bad’ discs. Keep in mind that the only full proof way to make a 1:1 backup is to do it yourself. iXtreme is as fullproof as it can be, in that it validates everything it possibly can from a firmware point of view, but a game can have slight data change somewhere, most commonly in DMI. Or it can be due to early copies being watermarked so to speak.
The new issues are things passing DVDMulleter but have corrupt or missing sectors.
COD4 has the biggest assumption that is it corrupt. The games verify on Mulleter fine but can be bad. For example, the original release of halo 3 verified fine in mulleter and booted but was found ot have missing video sectors and other minor things wrong. This could have resulted in the bans.
