I have never repaired an XBOX but I saw this in a local for sale
newsgroup and thought that if it may be a simple fix I can e-mail the
guy and fix it for him:

I've done a few repairs. But, the only repairs that are really possible for
anybody would be the power supply or the DVD-ROM drive.

If the hard disk or motherboard are what's wrong, the only people who can fix
it are those working at a Microsoft service center.

Each motherboard and hard drive pair are locked by a keycode. The motherboard
has the keycode while the hard drive is locked until the mobo unlocks it with
the programmed keycode. This is a problem because you can't simply take any
old X-Box motherboard and any old X-Box hard drive and expect it to work as
each X-Box mobo-HD combo has their own unique keycodes. The keycode from the
mobo won't unlock the unmatched hard disk and the X-Box will return with an
error code.

The only solution in this case outside of Microsoft is to mod your X-Box which
will allow it to accept unlocked drives and slap a new and larger hard disk
with a hacked kernel and dashboard loaded into it.

Of course, this kind of modification is illegal.

"I have a broken xbox that has never been opened or modded,Im not sure
whats wrong with it,it loads up to the starting logo then the
microsoft word pops up at the bottom.I tried to reboot about 30 times
and once it went straight to the clock settings.

Does the box bring up any error codes accompanied with a "This X-Box requires
service" message in several languages, or does it just hang there on the X-Box
splash screen?

Does the hard disk make any kind of noises?

Also, go ahead and leave the box on for several minutes. Eventually, if there
is a problem, the green power light will start to flash red and green and a
multi-language "service required" screen will pop up with a white number on the
upper part of the screen. This number indicates the error code, which helps to
steer us into finding out what's wrong. - Reinhart