Well it's been a long battle, but I think I've finally lost...
We didn't know whether the firmware chip or the circuit board was bad on the DVD drive, so we soldered the firmware chip on another DVD drive we had lying around.
We plugged it into the computer, and mtkflash had absolutely no problems identifying the drive and subsequently was able to dump the firmware no problem. At this point, I was pretty excited. If this works then we will be able to get the drive key and put it into the new DVD drive and I'll be home free! But it was not meant to be. The firmware dump is pooched and we are unable to get the drive key from it. We tried dumping it about 20 times, and it still didn't work.
So, we tried going through the firmware file with a hex editor manually looking for the key, but we were unsuccessful. It almost seemed like the data in Bank0 of the dump was copied into all the other banks, thus causing all the corruption. So basically banks1-3 (or is it 4?) had the same data that bank0 had instead of what should have been there. The key is stored in bank0, but it was itself corrupted, so what we had was 4 copies of a corrupted bank on the firmware chip.
The corruption could have occurred before I bought the XB, or it might have been when we were using the heat gun to get it off. Unfortunately I'm out about $50 on the project, so maybe I'll just wait and buy a new one instead of getting hosed on eBay again!
