Red Ring solutions

[DarklordKyo]

Because I'm an idiot, I once accidentally cut the power from my 360 while it was on [due to the way things are set up, I tend to unplug it from the brick in order to make sure it's not turned on in a position where the vents are blocked (it's a black 360 BTW, the one with more vents)]. The time after that when I tried turning it on, it played for a while, shut off, and red ringed. Is there a way to fix this myself without going inside the system itself? (seeing as though I think I've had it longer than 3 years).

 

[J Tyran]

If its working for a short time and then cutting off it sounds like its overheating, the slim revisions have a thermal cut off. Try putting it out in the open if you have it choked up on a confined A/V shelf or stand, see if you can get any dust out as well. Its fairly easy to open the case and clean it.

If its not choked for air and its not dusty it sounds a bit more serious, if your not big on PC and console modding there isn't much you can try. If you have a friend who is into that stuff you can get them to try reseating the heat sinks and reapplying some thermal compound, the OEM cheap crap they use in manufacture tends to degrade. If it was mine I would strip it down, clean it out and reseat the heatsink and maybe change the fans as it only costs a few £$? to see if that helps.

 

[Jamash]

The RRoD can be caused by many things, including an emergency cut-off that trips in the event of a power surge or power cut.

To rule out that you haven't just caused this emergency cut-off to trip when you unplugged it, you should completely unplug everything, i.e. unplug the power supply from the wall, unplug the power supply from your console and unplug the two halves of the power supply.

Then once you've unplugged everything, wait for 5-10 minutes to give everything time for any residual electricity to discharge, which in theory should reset the emergency cut-off functions in both the PSU and console, then connect everything up again and it should be fine.

If you still get a RRoD after this, then there is a possibility that you've damaged the PSU (and the 360 is detecting the incorrect voltage coming from the PSU and shutting down with a RRoD to prevent further damage), so if you can, try to find an exact replacement and test that too see whether it's just the PSU that is damaged. If a different PSU works without tripping a RRoD, then you'll just have to buy a new PSU. If the different PSU still causes a RRoD, then the problem is with the console and it would need to be fixed professionally.