This video steps us through one of the finer things in life, factory restoring a DVT4 using an XDK Recovery 5849 DVD-R that I’d burnt from an ISO found on the internet. You might say that isn’t one of the finer things in life at all! Well, you’re wrong.

With the 120 GB Western Digital SSD installed, it’s time to get some software onto this thing. I’ve got the SSD mounted in a 3.5-inch adaptor and connected through a SATA-to-IDE converter, while the Thomson DVD drive is still using a 40-pin parallel ATA connection. There are also the cables running between the motherboard, daughterboard and replacement drive. Not exactly how it left the factory, but the setup seems to be behaving itself so far. Fortunately, the development recovery disc gives us a way to prepare the replacement drive and install the Xbox development dashboard.

Even the Thomson optical drive managed to read the disc, which was a pleasant surprise! The recovery program offered a choice between the ordinary Microsoft dashboard and the developer version. Naturally, I went with the developer dashboard, selecting version 5691 from the menu on the Recovery 5849 disc.

After copying the files, the recovery process checked the existing firmware and appeared to skip the flashing stage because the relevant version was already installed. That caught me out the first time, as I thought something had gone wrong. Fortunately, the machine restarted and the XDK Launcher was up and running.

There are quite a few interesting settings and tools available, including the game region and developer options, although I suspect most people restoring an Xbox development kit will just be happy to see the thing booting again. I also gave the console a name. Dave. There you go, another piece of highly sophisticated development hardware officially christened!

One important detail is that this is development-kit recovery media, not an ordinary retail Xbox restore disc. The recovery process prepares and overwrites the target drive, so it’s not something to run against hardware containing data you want to keep. The ethernet connection isn’t needed for the basic restore either, but it will become useful when it’s time to upgrade the software over the network.

With the DVT4 restored using the XDK Recovery 5849 disc and the SSD behaving itself, the next adventure is updating the software to build 5933 over the network.

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