A retro console repairman got his hands on an Xbox 360 that refused to run games because of a “debt” message.
If you think that this phrase sounds strange, at least, you’re wrong. Such an error was extraordinary even for experienced users and the master himself.
Repairing Xbox 360s today and found an error I’ve never seen before. So apparently the previous owner somehow has bad debt with Microsoft and so this 360 is locked out forever”, — writes a master of social media.
At this point, a story from 10 years ago comes to mind. In 2012, Microsoft in the United States offered a special scheme — buy an Xbox 360 for $150 and take on a mandatory two-year Xbox Live contract, which cost another $360. If the conditions were not met, the console could be marked as a “debtor” in the system. At the time, it was not officially explained what would happen in case of non-payment — now the answer has become obvious.
Some users advised the wizard to simply “hack” the console. Especially since recently, the popular blogger Modern Vintage Gamer showed a Badupdate exploit that allows you to bypass Xbox 360 security in less than a minute. The only problem is that this method requires running the Rock Band Blitz demo from a flash drive. There’s a strange lock that doesn’t even seem to allow the trial version to run.
The solution came from Microsoft. Independent expert Eric Marcy explainedthat the solution has been around for a long time and doesn’t require any hacks: you just need to update your Xbox 360 to version 17559. Then the lock will disappear. This update appeared back in November 2019 and completely removed the “debt” check in the system keys. In fact, the company then decided to no longer support these restrictions and focused on a new set-top box. So, an official patch is enough, and the console works like new again.
Source: Tom’s Hardware
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