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

I can, but it doesn't help any. It turns SATA off completely, leaves me with only IDE in hddhackr, which got me no where.
I was able to get access to an older pc, and use it's sata setup with absolutely no problem (or monkeying about in the BIOS). I'm still not sure what was wrong with my pc, but I got the hard drive flashed and just need to back up the old one now.

 

Thanks for this tutorial! I was able to use my WD1600BEAS on my 360. I got this hdd by taking apart an old external hard drive enclosure.

At first, I tried hddhackr on my Asus P5Q Pro and it could not detect my hdd in any settings (IDE,AHCI,RAID0) and I had to wait a long time before I had access to my old desktop. I was able to hack it using my Abit IS-10 without messing with the BIOS.

Then I backup partition 2 and extracted the Compatibility and Content folders using Xplorer360 Extreme on my HP DV3T using the powered eSATA port. No need to restart whenever I swap between the 20 and 160GB drives. I tried using the 160GB version of Xplorer360 to restore partition 2 and drag/drop the folders, but my xbox wouldnt see it. So I formatted my drive on my xbox (106GB of free space) and tried making an image of my 20GB on the 20GB version of Xplorer360 and restoring onto the new one, nope. Then I tried Xplorer360 Extreme to drag and drop the files and it works! Now Im going through and testing.

 

Has anyone tried installing halo:reach with the hddhackr drive(250gb)? I'm having problems it might be just me.
Using the microsoft drive(20gb) is fine.
Can anyone recommend something?

 

After reading this it sounds like it could be a bad sector of the HDD :/ if it works fine with the regular 20 gig the best way to check would be to take your 250 gig to a friend with a 360 and reinstall Halo Reach using his system and see if it has the same problem and if so I would say its the hdd it self

 

I will try this tomorrow with my brothers console,thanks for the tip.

 

I deleted a few games and installed halo:reach on the hard drive that seemed to fix it.
I might decide to copy everything on the drive to my computer and undo the drive and run a few checks,then run hddhackr again.

 

I have a few questions myself

well my problem is that the drive i bought on eBay (bad idea, i know. didn't know at the time). Appearantly it's a hacked drive from china, and doesn't have the partition 2 for backwards compatibility. B/C was all i wanted it for, so I'm a little irritated . I thought i'd just follow these steps and make it the right way, but it is a hitachi...

Is there any build of HDDHackr that would work with hitachi drives? or perhaps a different program? If not, would there be any way to change the firmware of the drive, so that it worked like a WD?

 

Neverminds, i'm dumb!

so after scratching my head for HOURS i realized my stupid mistake, HDDHackr takes the WD drive and puts hitachi firmware on it! so my eBay drive is just fine there, all it needs is to be partitioned correctly. That much i can handle. Thanks all!

 

Use xplorer 360 and download the partition 2 and your good to go.Just skip everything in the guide till you see partition 2 on new drive

 

If that is the case then I may be able to save my 360 hard drive by other means.

 

lol i might have to do this myself

 

well what's your problem? if it's anything like mine i bet i can help

 

Well see what happened with me is that my drive did not come with a partition 2. According to what I read, it's an easy way to cut corners, that resellers hack these drives, and sell them for profit. So it had the partition 0 and the partition 3, but no 2. However, the firmware on it was all the way it should be, so HDDHackr wouldn't let me flash it and then re-partition. What i did was roll back to the 120GB firmware, and then forward again. So when moving foreward the firmware on the drive and the firmware for the 250GB were different; HDDHackr would let me flash (again); and all was well.

 

can it work with 500GB WD Blue Scorpio

I want to get a WD Blue Scorpio instead of a 250 GB, will it work ??

 

if you can flash the drive you wont be able to use more then 250gig unless its a Jtag xbox but then again thats a different story a retail xbox is only made to use the approved sizes through microsoft 20, 60, 120, 250

 

That is why when I flashed the drive it only read 250 GB instead of 500GB, but still it is a bargin to get the 500GB drive cheaper than the MS drive.

 

BTW: Do not use Acer laptops to do the hack as it will generate the famous sector 16 error everbody talking about. I had to do it using my PC and worked as a charm.

Thanks, you saved my day.

 

Ya it is cheaper but such a waste of half the drive (being 500gig) I would put it in my laptop or PS3 or even my home PC and just maybe my wii before the 360 but really hard drives are cheap now adays in general

 

A few technical questions for thread and flashing

1. Can I flash it from desktop? (desktop won't boot from USB)
2. is the official 250gb hdd, raw data or usable data?
3. When i flash my 320gb wd black, will it see it as a 250gb therefore only 230gb (est) be usable. (ya i get it that I can't use 320gb since no official hdd exists, question is will the os take the space it needs from 320gb and let me use 250gb.)

 

Thanks for the guide, quick question

Hopefully the threads still active. I just wanted to say thanks for the guide. I saw a video on this on Youtube, and decided to give it a try (after doing some research in Google). I bought a 250 gb Scorpio Blue at FutureShop (Best Buy) here in Canada. Got it at a better price than NewEgg or TigerDirect. I also bought a Xbox 360 S Hard Drive enclosure on ebay for $1. It encloses the drive and makes it fit perfectly into the 360 slim without having to shim the drive in a careless manner. My question is about VMPlayer. I built a .vmx image using Dos 6.22. Can I use this to do the rest of the apps with? Anyone try it that way instead of using the USB (or floppy) boot? Thanks, J.