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I was curious if someone here could lead me into the right direction. I have remote from recovery for an Xenon Alpha Developtement kit. Early Xbox 360 alpha hardware was a power Mac G5 running a custom Windows NT I believe. The problem I am having is the original hard drive was crashed and I am unable to recover the system without it currently having an active os. I am not 100% on the partition type but from what I can remember ther was a small hfs partition that contained a bootloader or some files to get the machine booting that is what I am missing. After I extracted the recovery .exe it seems to contain the dashboard launcher exe, the xshell and the Xbox rom.bin. I think everything to run the operating system
Is there but would like to try to recreate the boot processes is possible to get the rom to load. I know it would take a lot of work and mor decompiling. I know that originally the machine would use open firmware to elf load the system somehow. The rest on how the machine boots and loads a rom I need to learn more but would like to turn this into a project. May not have gone over everything and before people say Windows doesn't run on Mac or get an xedk I already have one I would just like to get the G5 back in working order. I've seen a lot of really cool projects done with some very skilled people and I hope to find someone who would be interested in either helping or pointing me in the right direction on how to load custom
Operating systems/rom/kernels/ as I am unfamiliar. Thanks for the read hope everyone has some great input on getting this going. Please pm for a list of specifics as far as the launcher contents go, the hardware checklist for the unit to boot, etc.

Windows NT ROM?

I'm pretty sure that the PowerPC version of NT never ran on a Mac, just some IBM and Motorola systems.

iansjack wrote:I'm pretty sure that the PowerPC version of NT never ran on a Mac, just some IBM and Motorola systems.

More to the point, it was discontinued after NT 4.0 (July 1996), which was released seven years prior to the start of the Xbox 360 project (Feb 2003). Also, according to Wicked-Pedo, Microsoft denies that the XBox and Xbox 360 kernels were based on any version of Windows at all, though a subset of the Windows APIs were implemented for it.

This doesn't mean that the prototypes weren't using a PowerPC version of the NT kernel, or that they didn't have a purpose-built version of such a kernel running on a PowerMac, but it does seem unlikely. If anything, they were probably running it in an emulator until a prototype developer SBC could be built. I don't know offhand how much the Xenon differed from the base Power architecture of the early 1990s, or from other implementations of it such as the PowerPC G5 or the Cell PPE used in the PS3.

Protip: If you've got any unusual hardware that requires specific software and you ever want to be able to fix it in the future if it breaks, make a backup of EVERYTHING.