Writing for a friend. Recently my friend had to purchase a new Xbox 360 HDD, the one he owned was failing but the one he had recently purchased had previous owner's data on it so he backed up the security sector (requirement for Xbox 360 hard drives) then used a sata to usb connector to connect it to his laptop and ran a hard drive eraser program (Active Killdisk he said it was) to ensure all previous owner's data would be gone for good, he then restored the security sector and the hdd read in his console just fine, transfered everything from the failing hdd as well and it worked, but the issue began when trying to reconnect to Xbox Live, the console said "blocked" on all connections which never happened to him before he then contacted Xbox Support and he explained what was going on and he said they told him the console was banned due to "modding" the hard drive. Real confusion now is does it really count as a modded hard drive with a legit security sector just being restored on a legit Microsoft HDD? the only "modding" I can tell was the secure erasing of content opposed to the quick format on the console
People have been modding hard drives for over 16 years, bans have never been a thing for it: Hack a 250gb, 320gb or 500gb Sata harddrive to work in the Xbox 360 and Xbox 360 Slim Your friend told Xbox support he was doing something Microsoft would never officially sanction, I suspect its then easy for the other person on the end of the phone to say that's why the console was banned to finish the call. I suspect in reality they probably can't say exactly why the console was banned. With the recent ability for people to easily run unsigned code via a softmod exploit its more likely something like that contributed to a ban if I had to guess, not knowing the history of the console or anything.