Okay, I hate to be 'that guy', but I am on a mission. People are selling 500gb Xbox 360 drives that work on stock Xbox 360 systems. They're all over ebay and amazon. I know, I know, HDDHackr can only use legit HDDSS.BIN files, etc...
I've been doing research for a few days, and been trying nearly everything I could think of to somehow get this to work. The bottom line seems to be that once you flash the 320gb security sector binary file to the drive, the firmware is rewriten, and the LBA is convinced that the drive ends shorter than it does. LBA size on the 500gb drive is 976,773,168, and on the 320gb one, it is 625,142,448. I looked at the 320gb HDDSS.BIN file with a hex editor, and quickly realized that since the file is signed by Microsoft, we'll never crack the code and just manually change the code.
So I went on to try every possible HDD manipulating tool I could find. No matter what tools I try to use, the firmware insists that the LBA is only 625,142,448, so it will refuse to see anything beyond this. HDAT2, or MHHD or anything on Hirens Boot CD runs into this limitation.
I spoke to someone who knows how to create 500gb drives out of new WD drives, earlier today, and he explained that he felt they were perfectly safe, due to there being an allowance in the Xbox Kernel NAND for 500gb drives... (maybe Microsoft was planning them, but never got around to putting them out?) I tend to believe him, because it would really turn people away from the Xbox brand, if they bought a 500gb drive off of ebay or amazon, threw it in their system, and then it banned them. He pointed out that the only way Microsoft could really stop it, is to block it in a future system update by modifying that part of the NAND that contains code to allow it.
I might just give in and buy a drive (these fabled 500gb drives that work on LIVE enabled systems, for less than half of the current 320gb Microsoft versions), but I just purchased a groovy 500gb WD Scorpio Black (the 16meg cash and the rpms do make a difference on a 360, although it is slight...), and I refuse to give up on this. He won't tell me how to do the hack myself, because he wants to keep selling them...
But the secret will get out sooner or later. Does anyone have any clue how to pull this off? Do any programs out there exist that let you manually edit the LBA of a drive on the fly? I'm a certified tech, and I'm willing to professionally try it on mine, just to get a valid tutorial out there to keep those ebayers from making money off of a hack that has to be possible for us to pull off too.
Either way, I'll keep trying everything, and post back if I pull it off. I really think we don't need that 500gb HDDSS.BIN file... we can probably just use the 320gb one, and then bump up that LBA. If I could just find a way to rewrite or overwrite the disk geography without letting the program first read what the bios states the drive has...