This the thing, I don't know where to start or end. I used one of my old xenon NAND's as a donor NAND and combined it with his CPU key to create freeboot. That didn't work initially but bit later it did.
So his console was using my whole NAND and KV too. Eventually that freeboot image worked. But after loading it up, he wasn't able to load either originals or backups, just kept saying play DVD. The theory is that he should have used the DVD key from my KV but no this didn't work.
We then flashed his Hitachi drive and extracted the DVD key, but that too didn't work. Last, when he booted freeboot via the eject button and got xell, it showed a 3rd different DVD key and that's the one that worked.
The more odd thing is that the DVD key displayed by xell is different from the one extracted from the console, yet he stated that it was loading games fine with the old blade dash.
We know the JTAG is working because xexmenu loads up and was able to FTP from his PC to the hard drive to install some apps. Dash version 9199