Hack a 250gb, 320gb or 500gb Sata harddrive to work in the Xbox 360 and Xbox 360 Slim

reubenb04 said:
InsaneNutter, can you please help. Am really stuck.
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Most compatibility problems are due to sata chipsets, some just appear to work a lot better than others. Usually disabling AHCI works for most people, however it does appear a few chipsets appear to give people lots of problems. If you can try another computer.

Dark Scyth said:
I believe that InsaneNutter runs 64-bit Win7 and he hacked his drive without a problem, though its just a guess.
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Yup i do, the hack is done from within Dos so the version of Windows you run doesnt matter. Xplorer 360 works on Windows XP, Vista and 7 (32 or 64bit) so the part that does need Windows the version doesn't matter.
 
Hey Nutter,

With the last system update, MS now allows you to plug in and use a USB drive (up to 16GB only) directly with the 360. Would this new functionality help with any of part of these directions?
 
You could transfer all your DLC, arcade games and saves to a usb drive, then transfer it back after hacking the new drive.

That cuts out the painful process of finding all your content with Xplorer 360 on the old drive, copying it to your PC and finally copying it back to the new drive :)
 
I wasn't looking for a guide when I found this, I was trying to find a good price on Microsoft's 250 gig drive. But I just wanted to say THANKS InsaneNutter for doing such a great tutorial!! It started me down a path and only took an hour with all the transfer time to go from the original 20gig to the 250 gig. Your time spent saved me $80.00!! :D

Thanks again..

T
 
So great tute followed it to the letter (except getting old data off the drive. I want the 250gb to be empty. Maybe thats my prob.)

My WD Hard Drive is the same one as the one pictured "Blue series BEVT" March 2010. I hack it to a Hitachi with Hddhackr and format it to partition 0/2/3 like it says, all works says its finished. I turn the PC on and off to Bios confirms drive is a 250GB Hitachi. Install it into xbox Hard drive casing, plug it into my 4 week old Elite console and "No Storage device found"

Is my problem because I've copied no data onto the new drive? Is there a partition that is a must for copying across?

Could anyone lend some assistance. I've tried the procedure a few times just in case and still no good.


Thanks all
 
I have a few questions and would greatly appreciate if someone could answer a few...or all of them. First of all I don't own a Xbox 360 and never have. However I'm planning on picking one up soon because they are on sale at a local store for $150 brand new.

How big of a hard drive do you actually need if you are only storing games / game saves or anything game related on the hard drive? My primary reason for buying a 360 is to play Halo 3, ODST, and the Reach Beta + Reach once it's released. I highly doubt I would ever store movies / music or anything else that can be stored on the xbox.

Is there any downside to using your own less costly hard drive over Microsoft's overpriced Xbox 360 hard drives (assuming you get everything working 100% like the tutorial aims for)?

Can this get you banned and is this detectable by Microsoft? I know this has been asked numerous times throughout this thread and in many other guides for doing the same thing, sorry. :( I just want to be 100% certain. Can anyone that has successfully done this and has been using the new hard drive for a long period of time confirm that this will not get you banned on Xbox Live? Thanks.

Right now I'm looking at the Western Digital Scorpio Black WD2500BEKT (it's a 250GB 7200 RPM 2.5" drive). It's $60 new on newegg and it looks like this hard drive can be use with the 360. Is this overkill considering what I'm buying a 360 for?

Is there anything special I have to keep in mind since I will be buying a brand new Xbox 360?

Thanks and sorry for the somewhat large post.
 
Dirty Sanchez said:
Install it into xbox Hard drive casing, plug it into my 4 week old Elite console and "No Storage device found"

Is my problem because I've copied no data onto the new drive? Is there a partition that is a must for copying across?
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Is the drive connected up correctly in the hard drive shell? you might have a loose connection. It sounds strange that your PC will now see the hard drive as an Hitachi, yet the 360 will not see the drive.

You can always try hacking the drive in another PC and trying it then, although it does sound like it was hacked ok.



Lemon said:
I have a few questions and would greatly appreciate if someone could answer a few...or all of them. First of all I don't own a Xbox 360 and never have. However I'm planning on picking one up soon because they are on sale at a local store for $150 brand new.

How big of a hard drive do you actually need if you are only storing games / game saves or anything game related on the hard drive? My primary reason for buying a 360 is to play Halo 3, ODST, and the Reach Beta + Reach once it's released. I highly doubt I would ever store movies / music or anything else that can be stored on the xbox.

Is there any downside to using your own less costly hard drive over Microsoft's overpriced Xbox 360 hard drives (assuming you get everything working 100% like the tutorial aims for)?

Can this get you banned and is this detectable by Microsoft? I know this has been asked numerous times throughout this thread and in many other guides for doing the same thing, sorry. :( I just want to be 100% certain. Can anyone that has successfully done this and has been using the new hard drive for a long period of time confirm that this will not get you banned on Xbox Live? Thanks.

Right now I'm looking at the Western Digital Scorpio Black WD2500BEKT (it's a 250GB 7200 RPM 2.5" drive). It's $60 new on newegg and it looks like this hard drive can be use with the 360. Is this overkill considering what I'm buying a 360 for?

Is there anything special I have to keep in mind since I will be buying a brand new Xbox 360?

Thanks and sorry for the somewhat large post.
Click to expand...


If you actually want to install games to the 360's hard drive then the bigger the better, I have around 34 games installed, loads of arcade games, some of the arcade games such as Call of Duty and Southpark are 800mb to 1gig+

I think ive got around 70gigs free atm on my 250gig drive.

If you dont want to install games you could probs manage with a 20gig drive for a while, although the whole point of me upgrading was that my 20gig drive was full even with no games installed... so you would probably find that too small when you start buying arcade games or DLC.

No downsides, you will not get banned... i've used my hacked drive for around 8 months now. There is always a chance Microsoft could disable hacked hard drives, however people have been doing this for over 2 years now and thats never happened.

When hacking a drive there is little if any price difference between the 120 and 250gig drives, so in all honestly just hack a 250gig drive and your future proofed.

As you dont own a 360 at the moment, you will probably need to buy the shell for the 360's hard drive unless the 360 you are going to buy comes with a hard drive.

You can buy just the hard drive shell on ebay: Hard Drive Disk Case Shell for Xbox 360 20GB 120GB HDD on eBay (end time 03-Jun-10 09:48:37 BST)

If your 360 doesn't come with a hard drive you will also not be able to dump partition 2 from the old drive and restore it on the new drive. Partition 2 contains the Xbox 1 emulator. If you dont ever plan to play Xbox 1 games this is not such a big deal as the drive will still work fine without that.
 
InsaneNutter said:
As you dont own a 360 at the moment, you will probably need to buy the shell for the 360's hard drive unless the 360 you are going to buy comes with a hard drive.

You can buy just the hard drive shell on ebay: Hard Drive Disk Case Shell for Xbox 360 20GB 120GB HDD on eBay (end time 03-Jun-10 09:48:37 BST)

If your 360 doesn't come with a hard drive you will also not be able to dump partition 2 from the old drive and restore it on the new drive. Partition 2 contains the Xbox 1 emulator. If you dont ever plan to play Xbox 1 games this is not such a big deal as the drive will still work fine without that.
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Thanks for your help and suggestions! I'll order one of the cases.

The 360 I mentioned is the basic arcade bundle and doesn't come with a hard drive. I do have a handful of my old xbox games including Halo and Halo 2 so it would be nice to have the emulator, although not a priority because I have them on PC. Is the second partition big? Could I just download it somewhere? If not there are a bunch of 20GB Xbox 360 hard drives on ebay for anywhere from 15 to 30 USD. However I've heard a lot of these aren't actually Microsoft drives. I guess I'll just look for a legit unopened one if I find I want the emulator.

Thanks for the help again.
 
Just wanted to first of all thank InsaneNutter for the excellent tut. Really good job and very usefull.

A couple of things that I wanted to mention. First off, not only did this help save me some dough on the hard drive upgrade but all together, I've probably saved the cost of an Elite console with all the deals, gift cards and this tutorial. I was very lucky to get what is now the Arcade version back on Black Friday 06 when Amazon had a run of 1000 of these for $99 (Which at the time was - I think - retailing for $299). I then used a Best Buy GC I got for Christmas to save on the cost of a 20GB drive (A while later, the Xbox DID suffer the dreaded RRoD around the end of 08 but I was able to get it repaired free of charge). And just recently, I bit the bullet and got a WD2500BEVT from Newegg for about $50 to get around M$ obscene policy on hard drive pricing.

After setting everything up in my 64 bit Win 7 machine, I was able to get to the step of flashing the WD250 but hit a wall after entering the "UNDO.BIN" as it then gave the "reading hdd sector 16 failed" error. I tried everything suggested with the SATA setup in BIOS but still was getting the above error. In desperation, I unplugged the IDE DVD writer (My SATA writer is still on it's way from Newegg), all the other SATA connections - even the one to my case's front panel and even put the WD on it's own power cable. Well one of those did the trick as the 250 formatted as if nothing had happened. Everything else went according to the tut except i then got stuck on the step to restore partition 2 (Everything after the flashing was done in a SATA to USB external dock). It looped on 2 tries so I decided to see if I could get my 360 to recognize it as is. Wouldn't you know it, it showed up first thing on getting to the Xbox memory palette in the dashboard. I thought I'd try formatting it to see if that would help the looping that I was seeing in Xplorer 360 Xtreme. After formatting was complete, I shut down the Xbox, popped the drive off the 360, took the HD case all apart again, stuck the bare drive back in the USB dock, opened Xplorer 360 Extreme and tried again. This time, there was no looping and partition 2 restored to the 250 without a hitch. Went on to D/L Xplorer 360 Extreme 250GB Edition & restored partition 3 by dragging (Injecting) the "Contents" folder back over from the folder it was in in my user directory in Windows. I didn't th9ink about it until I had already started it but I would think that this step would have been a bit faster on a SATA to SATA connection rather than the SATA to USB that I was doing. This took a couple of hours but once done, everything seems okay on first try. I'll report back if I encounter any serious problems after more use. Sooo nice to have well over 10 times the space I had with the old drive and it's constant "game" of Lets-See-What-I-Can-Delete-This-Time-To-Free-Up-Room-For-A-Save-Game.
 
InsaneNutter said:
Its a 250GB WD2500BEVT which is the same drive i used so you should be good to go.
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That's what I'm thinking too, but another question (it may have been answered, sorry for that):

Do I really need to connect this to my PC? And if I have that USB cable that can read X360 HDD's, is it okay if I use that?
 
The USB cable can be used for the stuff that requires Xplorer 360 (backing up and restoring content), however to actually hack the drive with Hddhackr you need to connect it to your computer.
 
I signed up just to thank you. I made the mistake of buying 3rd party one off ebay which ended up with lots of glitches after installing games. I did this and put it in my old 20gb enclosure and it works fine now. could have saved myself $30 doing it myself. still beats $130
 
I'm getting stuck with the message "HDDSS.BIN not present"
In my bios I have SATA operation modes that can be turned off or on, that's it.
I've tried it both ways. I cannot find AHCI, legacy or enhanced anywhere.
I'm running windows xp.
Please help.
 
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I don't know how to turn off AHCI, because I can't find it.
Same with legancy, I can't find it either.
I don't think God could get my drive flashed.
Same f***ing error "HDDSS.BIN not present"
I've been at this for 3 months.
I will pay someone to flash my drive (250gb WD2500BEVT)
and make it backwards compatible.
I live in Trenton, Ohio 45067.
 
do you have a laptop? if so you can try replacing your laptop harddrive with your western digital one. that is what i did. that was my only option because my only desktop pc uses ide connectors.
 
Emulator files download

elbogg said:
anyone know where i could find the original xbox emulator to copy onto this hard drive? i was thinking of just buying an empty case and this HDD for my 360 Arcade, but don't want to do that if i can't get the backwards compatibility.
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I am also buying a 360 Arcade and looking to add a HDD, so I have no emulator files to copy.

Dark Scyth asked about posting his Emulator files, but I can see no answer in the thread.

If not available for downloading, can somebody send them to me by email?

Thanks
 
Agnostic Yorkie said:
I am also buying a 360 Arcade and looking to add a HDD, so I have no emulator files to copy.

Dark Scyth asked about posting his Emulator files, but I can see no answer in the thread.

If not available for downloading, can somebody send them to me by email?

Thanks
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I don't think it would really matter if I posted them anyways because its signed to my profile (emulator files) (I think anyways). If that isn't the case though then i'll post my emulator files (if I get the ok) and after I get my 360 back (let someone borrow, should get it back soon though).
 
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