[Jayce]

For the past year, my brother has had his xbox 360 right next to his tower. Everything worked fine, till we changed his room around. He was using an authentic xbox cable to connect to his computer. Now that the computer is farther away from the xbox, I ended up making him a cat5 cable with some spare cable I had from work. It's a standard patch cable, B standard, blah blah.

He has 2 PCI NIC's on his computer. 1 to the router, the other to the xbox. The main connection is properly set up so he can "share" that connection on his computer, therefore giving the xbox connectivity.

We moved his stuff around, plugged everything in, and suddenly his 2nd NIC (for the xbox) started buggin out. It would acquire network address then instantly switch to unplugged, every second it flips back and forth.

I reinstalled the driver but it's still acting up. I'm questioning if a standard cat5 cable is what the xbox uses, or if there's some type of proprietary BS with the xbox patch cables like the original one that worked fine.

Any ideas?

[mikesgroovin]

well, for starters, do you have the old cable? Look at the pins and then make a cable that matches the pin out by color (or close to it...considering the colors might be different). A Xbox is just another node so it is going to require a cross over cable.

For reference, make the cable this pin out on one end: Green-White, Green, Orange-White, Blue, Blue-White, Orange, Brown-White, Brown.

Then on the other end: Orange-White, Orange, Green-White, Blue, Blue-White, Green, Brown-White, Brown

[Jayce]

Oh, ****. It's a crossover?? I thought it was a patch. I looked at the one end and saw 4 of the 8 wires connected. It was B standard, so I just assumed patch cable.

edit - just grabbed the old cable... it's a patch. It's a B standard on both ends, using both orange + both green wires. Just no blue's or brown's.

[mikesgroovin]

Originally Posted by Jayce

Oh, ****. It's a crossover?? I thought it was a patch. I looked at the one end and saw 4 of the 8 wires connected. It was B standard, so I just assumed patch cable.

edit - just grabbed the old cable... it's a patch. It's a B standard on both ends, using both orange + both green wires. Just no blue's or brown's.

Ok, no problem. BTW, "patch cable" has nothing to do with pin out (cross or straight through). A "patch" cable refers to flexibility and/or length and/or the thickness.

Sorry to go off on a tangent... Just throwing that out there in case you didn't know. You probably already did though.



OK...

Not sure if an Xbox or your PCI card has auto-MDI to MDI-X switching from but this isn't rocket science none-the-less. So, there are a couple things to check here.

1) To be absolutely certain that your cable works (check from the cable modem to the computer and see if it works).

2) Be absolutely certain that your original 1,2,3,6 only pinned cable is a 568A or 568B on both ends.

3) The other colors crimped wont hurt it. You can either crimp them or not. Your cable will only allow 10/100 though if you don't use them.

4) I'm pretty sure that an Xbox is a non-auto switching RJ45 port. So, to another port in a node that doesn't auto switch, you'll need a cross. Hopefully, someone can confirm/deny this.
If you haven't changed anything else than this should be all that needs to be checked.

[CalcProgrammer1]

1- the XBOX 360 has an AUTO SENSING PORT. You can use a patch cable OR a crossover cable, either one will work, as the 360 will detect cable type and configure itself accordingly.

2- the XBOX 360 only shows up as plugged into the network when it is powered ON. When the console is off, the Ethernet card is turned off, appearing to the computer as disconnected (unlike most modern PC's, which keep a connection for Wake On LAN).

3- the cable that comes with the XBOX 360 is a plain old ordinary Ethernet cable. Pretty sure it's just a patch cable. My friend has one and he can use either a patch cable he got at RadioShack or the one that came with the XBOX and they both work fine. I don't have the official one as I got my 360 used.

Try switching the cards' roles. Plug the Internet/router/whatever into the second card (the one that keeps acting up) and plug the 360 into the first card (the one you're using for Internet right now). Change Internet Connection Sharing to the other card if you're using it, if you're using network bridge it should automatically detect the connection swap and adjust accordingly. If the XBOX connection still acts up, you know that the card is fine, however, if the second card acts up even while connected to the Internet and not the Xbox, it could be a bad card.

If that doesn't work, try connecting the XBOX directly to the router. If the router acts up or the XBOX doesn't connect, it could be a problem with the 360's motherboard (Xbox 360's have a high failure rate, and a network card problem would be just one more possible failure to add to the already long list, I got my 360 because of the red ring of death).

[mikesgroovin]

thanks for clearing up the auto-switching port on the 360. I didn't realize it was a 360 vs the original xbox (I'm not up on my consoles .. which one is which... clearly ... lol)

In my opinion, try to keep your troubleshooting simple though. After all... it just worked a little while ago right? It's probably the cable. Perhaps other things in windows were changed. But if nothing else changed then I would troubleshoot the non-controls in the equation first rather than go crazy with the CheeseWiz

[Jayce]

Yeah. It worked completely fine. But we switched his room around, which prompted a longer cable. Now, I'm no expert, but at the same token, I make cables all day long, so I'm familiar with B and A standards and all of that.

The cable I used for his room is a cable from my toolbag. I often keep about 4-5 cables in my bag of different lengths in case a teacher (I work in a school dist) needs one. I test each one before I put it in the bag so I know when I hand it over to a teacher that I won't hear from them in 5 minutes complaining about the cable.

But, who knows, I'll try another one. It's just weird, when the cable is plugged in, the card will say disconnected/acquiring and go back and forth at such a high rate of speed it's unreal. That's the part that confused me.