I am coming back to the xbox modding scene after many years (my last mod was 14 years ago), wow has it changed so much.

Backstory

I bought 2 original xbox consoles in January. Both are 1.1 versions made only a week apart both made in the china factory. Both had never been opened (until I opened them last week) and apart from some dust both are in excellent condition. The clock capacitor not leaked on either, although I do plan to remove it on both.

I have isopropyl alcohol cleaned xbox1 which I bought as faulty for £10. It booted to error 11 and when I took it apart the DVD drive (a Philips) is completely dead, no power. I will try to investigate more, but this is why I bought xbox2. I paid £21 for xbox2, it booted no errors but would not read discs. I took it apart and disassembled the Samsung DVD drive, after removing a HUGE amount of dust changing the drive band and cleaning the lens this now reads discs. I have soft modded it using the Rocky5 mod. I follow this guide up to the point of drive swaps (which I have not yet performed). I found that guide useful as I don't have a DVD burner so was able to FTP the extras disc onto the harddrive.

Back to xbox1 I moved the Samsung drive over and the error 11 vanished and I was able to softmod this xbox also up to the point of drive swap. So I now have 2 softmodded xbox's, xbox2 which I plan to keep stock but put an old 320gb SATA drive in once my SATA to IDE adapter arrives. Then for xbox1 I had the crazy idea to create an xbox slim, based on old images I have seen. Take out the DVD drive and cut 2-3cm off the top and paint it a custom colour.

Question

Do I do a TSOP flash to xbox1 to remove the DVD check on boot? Also can I do this with the Rocky5 extras disc as covered in this video? As I said I have no way to burn DVDs so if people recommend Hexen disc I would need to FTP that over. I would rather use the Rocky5 method as it looks easy. Should I use M8Plus and does that include the no-dvd flag or do I need to create my own customer config for a bios?

On the TSOP and Bios bits I am out of my depth and keep reading old articles that say a bios with no-dvd still does not mean the DVD can be removed completely. I don't want to run the DVD board as some suggest as xbox1 I do not have a functional DVD drive for. Also is there any advantage with a slim to run a 2.5" drive over a 3.5"? I plan to put a 1TB drive in the slim.

Should I also TSOP xbox2? Any reason to do this, I plan to keep the stock hard drives for both so recovery should not be an issue as I understand it. Is there an advantage to TSOP both?

Many thanks in advance.