Can I use a Japanese xbox dvd drive on US xbox?

[zeturi]

I bought a cool looking xbox for $20 at my flea market a few days ago, because I had never seen another like it. This is what it looks like:

After a bit of digging, I found that it was a limited edition Japanese Halo 2 xbox. Since it's Japanese, I have no way to power it on with US wall power. However, I do have the working guts of a US system, minus a functioning disk drive. Usually, you can swap disk drives between xboxes with no problem, any drive will work with any system.

However, the disk drive is Japanese. My question is, can I pull the disk drive from it, use it in a US system and be able to read US region games and DVDs? I know you can't play out of region stuff on your system usually, but I don't know it the region lockout is located in the disk drive, or on the system board itself.

I would normally just tear this system apart and find out on my own, but I'd rather know for sure before breaking the warranty seal on a limited edition console. I plan to just rehouse a US system inside the Halo 2 guts, and soft mod it. If it doesn't work, I'll likely just sell it as is.

 

[Ashen]

I'm 98% sure the region lock is in the bios, which is why a TSOP flash is able to remove it. When you TSOP flash it doesnt touch the DVD drive at all.

 

[zeturi]

That sounds about right. And, it sounds good enough to try it out. I will post the results.

 

[zeturi]

I just got around to doing this, and I can confirm it works absolutely fine. Now that I've got it all working though, I find out both American system boards I have are version 1.6 . No softmods for meh.

Ah well, at least I can play games on it.

 

[XCVG]

Softmods work fine on 1.6. It's TSOP flashes that don't work. If you are interested, visit this site: http://www.biline.ca/xbox_uxe.htm