360 One Flashing Red Light

rynd0r · 4 Jun 2008 at 13:16

Last night my 360 died, 1 year 6 months old with the single flashing red light (Error 74, Serious Hardware Failure). Fine I thought for a second, the warranty was extended to 3 years. Then I recalled the extension only covered the 3 flashing red lights.

I rang up support to see what the situation was and they would like £65 to fix it. Can anybody offer me any advice here on how to possibly fix myself apart from the towel trick. Who else has suffered from the 1 flashing red light?

I have read many others on the net initiailly seeing strange block lines appear across the screen when playing then on the next boot having the console die on them, which is what happened to me.

It just stinks that I purchased the premium for about £280 Jan 07, so close to finishing GTA aswell :mad:

doran1801 · 4 Jun 2008 at 13:18

ring them up and say you have 3 red lights?

rynd0r · 4 Jun 2008 at 13:35

Would they be that gullible?
Surely when it arrived and had just 1 red light they would say they are billing me for repair. :confused:

Kyle009 · 4 Jun 2008 at 13:37

Can i just ask why you are against performing the towel trick?

Nate · 4 Jun 2008 at 13:38

Towel that bad boy!

BigChin1 · 4 Jun 2008 at 14:05

Exact same error happened to mine 4 days before GTA was released. To say I was annoyed was an understatement. On the plus side I had 3 weeks left on my warranty.

I tried the towel trick out of curiosity a few times and was able to get the console working for a few hours. But once it had cooled down the next day the error was back. After about 3 days the towel trick did nothing to help (nor did it produce 3 red lights). So I sent it off and it came back refurbished in 8 working days.

Baz · 4 Jun 2008 at 14:31

check out this as it may tell you more about the error

rynd0r · 4 Jun 2008 at 18:51

Yeah I should have mentioned I towelled it (spelling?) a few times with no joy. Looks like I will have to cough up to microsoft, although I know an old friend who is handy with 360's might get in touch with him.

Phemo · 4 Jun 2008 at 21:04

Do not towel it, it's a waste of time and the problem will only come back again later, if it 'fixes' it at all. It will just do more damage in the long run.

In short unless you try your luck with MS, the only reliable way to get it going again after an E74 is to crack the thing open and heatgun the motherboard. Xclamp fix may help, but it's a problem with the scaler chip or the connection from GPU to the scaler chip. It needs heatgunning.