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

Discussion in 'Xbox 360 Guides' started by InsaneNutter, Dec 8, 2009.

  1. zabiru2

    zabiru2 Member

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    Hi again, finally i flashed the drive, but it doesn't show in the xbox, it's because of the chipset?
     
  2. InsaneNutter

    InsaneNutter Resident Nutter Staff Member

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    Does it even show as unformatted. If not then it will be a problem with the sata chipset, even if Hddhackr thinks its flashing the drive it's probably not doing it correctly.
     
  3. zabiru2

    zabiru2 Member

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    It's like none drive been connected.
    The drive is dated june 2013, is supported?
     
  4. joe2k1

    joe2k1 Member

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    I have a 500gb drive that is currently in use. I would like to pick up a (hdmi!!) xbox 360. Assuming I can find a special case to hold the drive, is it possible to use that drive in another xbox 360? i have a valid xbox live account and would like to play the games from the particular drive. Any ideas?
     
  5. InsaneNutter

    InsaneNutter Resident Nutter Staff Member

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    If the drive can be hacked then i dont see why not, or failing that just got a usb caddy for it and use it as an external usb drive on the 360. So one way or another you should be able to use it.
     
  6. sideskroll

    sideskroll Member

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    Hi guys. I have a quick question that I hope someone can answer.
    I have a WD5000LPCX-22VHAT1 drive (manufactured in 2018)
    Will it work? Woul I risk bricking the drive if I try to hack it?
    Thanks.
     
  7. Joerolando2701

    Joerolando2701 New Member

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    So I just backed up my content data and flashed my drive from 320 to 500 how do I get my content back onto the drive? Party buffalo gives me errors when trying to load the drive I have verified the drive work in my xbox 360 and is showing correct size but have no way to restore my save files
     
  8. InsaneNutter

    InsaneNutter Resident Nutter Staff Member

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    Try format the hard drive in the Xbox 360, then copy some content such as a demo to it. After you have done this open the drive again in Party Buffalo. I do find Party Buffalo is quite buggy on Windows 10 sadly, so if you have access to a Windows 7 machine it does seem to work a lot better on that.
     
  9. sideskroll

    sideskroll Member

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    UPDATE: If anyone finds themselves in the same position as I was just go ahead and do it. It works.
    Also, I was able to use FreeDOS (via rufus) with no issues whatsoever.
     
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  10. loplo

    loplo New Member

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    Hi everyone.
    I have a WD7500BPVT, that is on the supported list. The question is, what BIN file should I use for this HDD, since I can't find any 750GB file in the archives?
    I don't mind if I won't be able to use the whole capacity of the HDD.
    Thanks
     
  11. InsaneNutter

    InsaneNutter Resident Nutter Staff Member

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    Use the 500gb security sector, that will allow you to use as much space as possible.

    The alternative is to get an enclosure and use it as a USB hard drive, which will allow all 750gb to be used.
     
  12. loplo

    loplo New Member

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    That sounds promising. The next problem is, that I can't find any BIN for the 500GB BPVT in the archives.
     
  13. InsaneNutter

    InsaneNutter Resident Nutter Staff Member

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  14. cosailer

    cosailer New Member

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    I just bricked my 120g wd hdd (WD1200BEVT-00A0RT1) by restoring the drive with a incompatible bin (I don't have the original bin file since I bought the console second hand). The recovery method did not work, and the drive cannot be recognized anymore. I was wondering if it can be restored using the Xbox 360 120GB Hard Drive Security Sector, so at least the drive can still function. BTW the drive has an external bios chip that I can read and modify easily. If anyone owns this drive could provide a bios backup, maybe I could initialize mine again with WDR5.3? I have attached my bricked bios here also.
     

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  15. OG Rocket

    OG Rocket New Member

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    Hi all, I've just joined this forum to ask for some help. I saw lots of versions of this guide here on the Internet, so I guess this place is the origin of this method. So I've bought myself Western Digital WD5000BPKX hard drive because I saw it as compatible on the list. At the same time on some russian forum, I saw conversation about compatibility of Advacned Format drives with xbox 360. Many people say that AF drive will die quickly becuase xbox doesn't support it. So my question is, does it really matter if the drive is AF or not, and will I have any issues with it? Just to mention, I bought it new in the store, as it seems it's old revision so they charge up to 3 times on those hdd's price, and I don't want it to die quicklyy. Thanks in advance, I would've asked earlier, but i thought this thread is quiet, then i saw 2018 posts)
     
  16. InsaneNutter

    InsaneNutter Resident Nutter Staff Member

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    This is the original guide, many people have copied and pasted it over the years.

    I don't think it will cause the drive to fail any quicker, is their actually any evidence of this happening to people with the 360? i'm pretty sure no one has ever mentioned it here if so.

    When using Advanced Format drives with legacy operating systems, it is important to realign the disk drive to avoid performance degrading. This is most likely not been done by the 360, so at worst over time performance might degrade somewhat.

    However on the 360 I honestly don't think you will ever notice any difference, games are designed to load from DVD's as it is and only improve a little in most cases when loading from the hard drive.

    All I can tell you is I hacked a 500gb drive years ago which i'm pretty sure supports Advanced Format. That drive is going strong today and games load as quick as they always did.
     
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  17. OG Rocket

    OG Rocket New Member

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    Hi, thank you for your reply. Yeah this guide has been copied to lots of other sites, providing info about 360 modding. Saw it translated to many languages. Thanks a lot for sharing this, i think it helped many people.

    I've read about AF causing problems on few russian forums dedicated to console modding. I asked for anyone whoever faced any problems to share their knowledge but i didnt get any info regarding the problem.

    You're right about aligning the drive and WD provide their own software to perform it for example to use with Windows XP and on some drives it is realised by a jumper. I think flashing the drive with 360 compatible firmware erases any align so it makes no difference if you align it or not. Someone stated that degradation of performance is the result of 360 not being compatible with AF as it makes those drives mechanics to perform as twice movements which both slows it down and puts it under high pressure working conditions. The common problems which people faced are that first, all the saved info will be lost after turning the console down and the next day people launched it, they saw drive requiring formatting in the storage settings, the second is performance slowdown and game crashes which ended up with drive dying and the last thing ive heard about is those flashed drives having issues with watch dogs cutscenes lagging pretty badly ending up in frozen 360. Watch dogs one is pretty common, ive read about it maybe 10 times on different places, though i couldn't get any evidence, mostly cuz those topics were popular few years ago.

    I will try to flash my drive as soon as i get my hands on a pc. Ive been trying to sell it to get another one, but now i think there is no need to. Then again, thanks for clearing this up.
     
  18. figarojones

    figarojones New Member

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    Do you know of any way to do the format that doesn't involve HDDHackr? My bios only offers AHCI and Raid, neither of which allows HDDHackr to detect the drive. Ive tried Googling it, and everything is basically copy/pasted from here.
     
  19. InsaneNutter

    InsaneNutter Resident Nutter Staff Member

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    You could buy a USB enclosure and just use the drive as a USB hard drive for the 360, that will be fine unless you want to also play backwards compatible Xbox games on the 360.

    USB drives were never an option on the 360 back when I created this tutorial. As for hacking the drive the only other option is to find an older PC, i did struggle when i did a 500gb drive years ago. I ended up using my old MSI Wind Netbook.
     
  20. CharleswithanSSD232

    CharleswithanSSD232 New Member

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    Hi, man I just read over the guide and decided to buy a 120gb SSD from Kingston. I was wondering what I should do because I plugged it in and HDD hackr is not detecting it
     

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