InsaneNutter

After having a 20gb drive for the last 4 years and getting annoyed about having to constantly delete stuff I did something about it. I purchased a nice 250gb laptop hard drive for £30 and used hddhackr on it to enable the 360 to use it.

I think doing your own drive is the way to go as Microsoft charge £89.99 just for the 120gig drive here in the UK, at that price I could make 3x 250gig drives for the same price!

This guide will show you how I did that, its worth mentioning that you can also hack a 20gb, 60gb and 120gb drives, however i think doing a 250gb is the best value for money.

First you will need to buy a hard drive to use in the Xbox 360

Hddhackr works with the following Western Digital Drives:
- WD Scorpio Series BEVS/BEAS
- WD Scorpio Blue Series BEVS/BEVT
- WD Scorpio Black Series BEKT/BJKT
- WD VelociRaptor Series

I purchased a 250gb WD Scorpio Blue Series drive (WD2500BEVT) for around £30 at CCL Computers.



The first thing you will want to do is create a bootable USB drive, for this I used a tool called Bootable USB Drive Creator Tool.

Download Bootable USB Drive Creator Tool

Unzip and load the program, be sure to right click and run as an administrator.

Select your USB drive
Set the file system as FAT
Tick quick format and Create bootable drive
Select the box with 3 dots and choose the USB Drive Boot Files\MS-DOS folder as the location.
Hit start and you will have a bootable usb drive within a few seconds.



Now Download Xbox 360 250GB Hard Drive Security Sector and Download HDDHackr v1.22 Build 20091022

For anyone who wants to hack a diffrent size drive here are the security sectors that can be used for a:
20gb drive
60gb drive
120gb drive

Unzip both to the USB drive you just made bootable

Be sure to rename the HDDSS_250GB.BIN to HDDSS.BIN

The end result should be something like this, don’t worry you will not have an UNDO.BIN yet.



You will need to shut down your pc now, I would advise you disconnect all the other hard drive in your computer just to stop you accidently hacking the wrong drive!

Now connect the hard drive you want to hack to your computer



Power your computer back on, before you carry on it might be an idea to enter you bios configuration and ensure the SATA operation mode is set to ATA or disable AHCI depending on the options you have. On some motherboards this can also be called legacy or enhanced, if you are presented with this you want to set it to legacy. This will vary depending on your motherboard / bios.

The above appears to be the most common cause for people not been able to flash there drives.

Now tell your computer to to boot from the usb drive, this will be different depending on your motherboard, on my pc I have to press F11 then select the drive I wish to boot from.

You will find yourself at a dosprompt, type hddhackr and press enter.



All been well hddhackr will have listed all the drives in your system, in my case the drive I want to hack is number 5.



After entering the number you will be asked if you want to dump, flash or restore the firmware, select F to flash.

Type in the name of the security sector you want to flash, this will be HDDSS.BIN if you have followed this tutorial.

You will get a message saying that the information in file HDDSS.BIN does not match the drive’s firmware info. Do you want to flash the Xbox 360 compatible firmware.

Say yes to this:



You will then be asked if you also want to create partition 0/2/3

Again say yes to this, you drive should now be hacked, congratulations!



An UNDO.BIN will have been saved on your USB drive, keep this safe as you will need it for if you ever want to restore the drive back to normal.

Opening the 360 drive enclosure

Now you need to open your Xbox 360 hard drive, you will need a Torx T6 screwdriver to do this.



You can now remove the top, the mechanism to lock/unlock the HDD-bay on your Xbox 360 console might fall out… don’t worry it’s easy enough its put back together, just look how it is in my photo below.

Now you have 4 more screws to remove, these require a Torx T10 screwdriver, you can then remove the metal case.



Now you can unplug the power and sata cable from the drive, then slide it out pulling the drive gentily up as you do so.



You should now have your original drive



If you want to restore the Xbox 1 emulator to your newly hacked drive or your save games you will need to connect your old 360 drive to your computer and boot windows.

Download Xplorer 360 Extreme.

Now unzip and right click and run it as administrator.

Select Drive > Open > Harddrive or Memorycard



We are going to backup the Xbox 1 emulator so you will still be able to play Xbox 1 games on the 360.

To do this select Drive > Backup Partition 2 and save the backup.



If you want to backup your profiles, saves, arcade games, demos, dlc and videos you basically want to dump your Partition 3 > Content folder, I had to dump a few folders at the time because Xplorer 360 had random crashes for me.



Now shutdown windows, disconnect your original 360 drive and connect the hacked 250gb drive.

When windows has loaded up again load Xplorer 360 Extreme again, remembering to run it with administrator rights and select Drive > Restore Partition 2 and select the backup you made from your old 20gig drive.



It is important you just close Xplorer360 after that, massing about with anything else will corrupt Partition 3.

Now Download Xplorer 360 250gb Edition, this works fine with Partition 3 on 250gig drives, however trying to modify anything on partition 0 or 2 will just corrupt the drive!! Trust me save yourself some time and don’t do it.

Also don’t use Xplorer 250gig edition on any other sized drive either, it will just corrupt the drive.

If you do corrupt you drive just connect it to your Xbox 360 and format it.

After you have restored any content you can now shut your pc down and put the 250gig drive in your 360’s drive enclosure, it might be an idea to test everything is working correctly before re assembling the enclosure.



Hopefully I have covered everything you should need to know to do this hack yourself, if not feel free to ask and I will try and help.

FAQ:

Some of my save games no longer work:
The easy solution to this is to move the save game on to the memory card from the old hard drive, if it will let you. Not all saves let you move them between storage devices.

DrDrrae has posted a solution that doesn't require a memory card, Link.

I have attached CONcept and Hash Block Calculator which he says are required. Ive not tested that myself as all my game saves appear to work, fine however people have stated it works perfectly.

I restored my data back however the Xbox 360 doesn't see it?

Have a look at my post here, that explains where your files likley ended up and a solution to get them in to the folder you want.

I want to be able to drag and drop files with Xplorer 360

UAC has to be switched off for this to work, simply running the program with admin rights doesn't work.
To do this in Windows 7 go to Control Panel\User Accounts and Family Safety\User Accounts and select "Change user account settings" Now slide down to never notify and hit ok. You might need to re start your pc for the changes to take effect. Remember to enable UAC again when you are finished.

Attached Files

	Bootable_USB_Drive_Creator_Tool.rar (302.0 KB, 4193 views)
	Xplorer 360 Extreme.zip (57.5 KB, 2877 views)
	CONcept 0.3.zip (1.52 MB, 552 views)
	Xbox 360 Hash Block Calculator.zip (205.5 KB, 478 views)

MasterChief

Great guide, most other guides I have seen for this don't tell you how to backup and restore the Xbox 1 emulator.. i ended up corrupting my drive a few times before i found out how to do that.

I wish this guide was up before I hacked my drive, it would have saved me a lot of time and messing about

InsaneNutter

Same here, I taught that i would just to able to copy the files from partition 2 to my pc, then back to the new drive but that wasn't the case.

I thought the part with hddhackr would be the hardest bit yet it ended up been one of the easiest parts of the process.

Hopefully this guide will make it as easy as possible for anyone considering the hack!

RFBadFish

Hi,
Finally a decent tutorial on the dreaded HDD upgrade!!
Are the rumours of Xbox Live bans for doing this true in your experiences or are people just too scared to do it?
Thanks again for the info, much appreciated by my bank balance!!

Titcher

Microsoft aren't banning for using unofficial hard drives, they're banning for using modified DVD drives however. But yeah, the hardest part of this for most people is finding their T6 screw driver.

RFBadFish

Cheers Titcher, much appreciated.

glg

I have folowed your great tutorial to the letter and get stuck at the same point every time. I get to the part where you hit f for flash and get a message enter file name for sector 16-22 ( e.g. HDDSS.BIN): This is different to your screen shot
"You will get a message saying that the information in file HDDSS.BIN does not match the drive’s firmware info. Do you want to flash the Xbox 360 compatible firmware". What am i doing wrong? I am new to this so i would appreciate some tech help.

InsaneNutter

How does what you see differ from my screenshot?

You didn't actually say what the problem was, I need to have some idea about what is going on to try and help you.

__________________

glg

when i get to f i hit enter and get a message that asks me to enter file name for sector 16-22 e.g hddss.bin, this file is on my stick so type this in and get another message that tell me that that hddss.bin is not present. On your screen shot you seem to have data from the hddss.bin this information i do not see. I am puzzled. Hope you can help. My sata card is a via 6421 that i use for DVD flashing. Data on screen on boot is displayed and drive is found on 0XE800 as pri master. I have disconected all other drives for this operation. Hope you can help.

ThatGuyDiego

I just did this it worked out pretty well. Some notes from when i did it.

I had an 8 gig thumb drive. I had to use fat32 to format and it wasn't an issue worked just fine.

The xplorer 360 app gave me alot of issues and didn't seem to work to well for me. I assume this might be from me using it under windows 7 64 bit pro.

Just in case, I had a buddy at work with a spare 360 and transfer cable and was nice enough to lend it to me. So when i was done preping the 250 gig drive. I put the old 20 gig back and backed up on the spare drive my friend had. I poped the 250 gig drive in. It showed half of the drive was used. I assumed this was from trying to restore partition 2 and my content from my 20 through xplorer 360. I formatted the 250 gig drive in the xbox 360 utilities in the console. It asked me for my serial number for my xbox. I inputted the serial number in and bing all my space back. Tried an old xbox 1st gen game and it didn't work. I then swaped the drives to the spare 20 gig (which had my data backed up on it) and used the transfer cable. When it was done. everything worked i had my old data and xbox 1st gen games worked no problem.

The transfer cables are free if you order them from microsoft and a spare 20 gig drive in a case is 20-30 american on ebay usually. If the second half of the tutorial gives you crap this may be another option to try.

thank you very much for the great tutorial InsaneNutter u rock!