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

"No ATA identify possible"

WD2500BEVT
LBA: 488397168
17 Nov 2009

Followed all of the directions

EDIT: Gigabyte MA770-UD3 motherboard with AMD, computer recognizes the drive fine. BIOS set accordingly.

 

I got that when I had the drive attached to sata port 6 or 7. When I connected it to port 1, it worked fine.

However, I went through the process and ended up with a 19.2GB drive according to the 360.

What I did:

Pulled a 20GB drive from its case.

Hooked it up to the big pc, ran the tool to extract sector 2 and saved it.

Removed the 20 and attached the 250.

Ran the flasher with the 250gb firmware file, went fine.

Ran the tool and restored sector 2.

Put the drive back in the case and hooked it to the 360.

360 reports an empty ~20GB drive.


Any ideas on what I did wrong? Only other thing that happened is I forgot to set the mode back from IDE to RAID on my system and windows booted all ticked off. I reset it and when I rebooted, it had to do a system repair for about 15 minutes. The 250GB drive was attached when that happened.

Maybe windows decided to muck up the drive for me?

 

I appear to be schrod.

I pulled the 250gb out of the case and reattached it to the big computer. The flash program thinks its a seagate 20gb, which is the make of the old drive i pulled out of the original 360 20gb drive case.

All I did with that drive was backup partition 2 with xplorer 360 extreme and restore it to the new drive. But somehow the 250gb drive thinks its a seagate 20gig.

I tried to restore the original firmware, which correctly reports as a WDC WD2500BEVT drive, but hdhackr says "western digital vendor intro failed on port 0x0170" tells me to make sure I have a WD drive connected, and gives me the option to continue sending. Thats been going for 15 minutes with no result.

Any ideas?

 

Tried restoring, brute force reflashing, nothing is working. I'm getting status 0x51 after telling it to resend the command until the drive responds. Unplugged power from the drive and repowered and tried again, same result.

I have NO idea how this drive got ident'ed as a seagate 20gb unless xplorer 360 extreme did it.

 

It might have been helpful to double check which drive I was tinkering with. It seems I set the old 20gb drive and the new 250gb drive next to each other and then stuck the wrong one in the case.

On my way to being named village idiot of the year...

 

Yeah, nothing like trying to do something like this while your 5 year old wants help with lego star wars and your wife needs help figuring out something with her blackberry...

After actually trying the correct drive, I did get a good hack on it, the xbox 360 recognized it and was pretty happy with it, showing the right size, but when I put the transfer cable on it and started the transfer, it went for about an hour and then said the drive had been disconnected. Drive was spinning and still firmly connected to the cable, so I dont know what the problem is. I used this cable and process to go from my old 20GB to the 120GB, so I know it works. I guess that was a lot less data to move.

I'm also now an expert in opening up and reclosing the xbox hard drive case. One other protip: make sure you have the metal rf shield on the drive before completely screwing it together and then realizing its still sitting on the table.

I'll bet I'm making you guys all feel a lot smarter right now...

 

So I put the 250gb back on the 360, did a format on it, all worked well and looked good.

Put the 120gb back on, deleted all the 'load to hard drive' games, took another 25gb of my 5 year olds game downloads off, taking it down to about 67gb.

Put the transfer cable on it and stuck the transfer disk in, and it completed successfully. Not sure if it was the format, what I deleted or the amount of data it had to transfer. In this case it was more like 4 hours worth instead of 8+ hours. It occurred to me that the transfer disk I had was made to convert a 20 to a 120, and maybe there was a bug in the s/w for transfers from a 120 to a 250 with some of the data from a 20gb as an intermediary. Who knows.

Now I just have to hope that MS never bans these hacked drives. I guess if they do, I'll have to send my 5 year old along with a small nuclear device to redmond after all this #%$#$....if my short story doesnt make the average joe want to pony up $120US for a disk instead of going through 3 days of horsepuckey, nothing will!

 

Thank YOU

Thank YOU for the best, most complete TUT that I could find. Most of the other
that I found relating to this Hack were copy/paste jobs with info left out.

It took me less that 15 min to get everything done and working on my XboX360.

THANK YOU - THANK YOU - THANK YOU FOR MAKING IT EASY

 

Could not have asked for a better tutorial !!!! they should all be this way

Now on to my problem

Couldnt get to the hard drive from my other dell dem. 3000

so i am using a dell dem. 4700 w/ onboard sata

i can get all the way to pressing f to flash

Then type hddss.bin , after that i get a msg saying that hddss.bin is not found

so i go to sata operations in my bios. There are no settings for legacy , ata, ahci or any thing

All i have are normal and combination - I tried both settings and still no luck

Is it easy as waiting for my VIA chipset to come in the mail to be able to finish the flash? Or should dell sata controller's handle the job?

Any help would be appreciated

Thank you all

 

i also do not have any game saves or downloaded content to worry about

i only want to flash the hard drive and format in the 360 then recover gamer tag

hopefully this shouldnt be a problem ?

 

sector 16 bad

I followed this tutorial, The drive worked fine. I tried to load Halo 3 on the hard drive and the xbox rebooted. Tried several times finally decided to format drive through the xbox. About half way through it rebooted again. Now the xbox wont recognize the drive and when I tried to set it back with the undo.bin it gives me an error about sector 16 0xFE00.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

ok , So this morning i recieved my VIA controller.

Now hddhackr is finding my hard drive on my original i started with. But when i go to tye HDDSS.BIN it still gives me

File is not present , Did i install the wrong driver for the chipset ? I dont understand what i am doing wrong

My mobo doesnt have any settings for ahci,legacy or anything

 

ok so i went back to the only place that pretains to legacy settings

and it seems to be on my parrallel port or something like that

and they are abreveations , epp , ecp ps/2 but i dont see anything for legacy , ahci , or of the sort

 

for some reason my bin file is 4kb instead of 3.50
i am running win xp pro

 

Redrustler,

I am having the same problem HDDHackr can find the drive but I get HDDSS.BIN File is not present. Did you find an answer?

 

not yet i have been digging around for 2 days with it. I am working on something now if it works i'll send you the link

 

I hope this will help others if they are having problems.

In dos mode (where you boot up the PC using the USB stick) I found that my new 250GB hard drive would only work with the flashing software (hddhackr) on sata pots 0 and 1, the 250GB drive would not work on any of the other ports & came up with an ATA error, at first I thought I had a faulty drive & then saw that the flashing software saw my first two drives on ports 0 & 1, but all the other drives came up with ATA errors. After putting my drive on sata port 1 using legacy mode (set this in bios) I had no problems flashing it.

Now if you have an Xbox 360 transfer cable at hand then it makes hooking up the drive to you PC a bit easier using Xplorer, but I had to use a different USB port for each drive. So I had my Xbox 360 120GB drive plugged into USB front port 1 via the transfer cable & used Xplorer to back my drive & then plugged the new 250GB dive into USB front port 2 via the transfer cable & used Xplorer to test the drive.

As I had the cable & I read people had problems with some of there DLC I hooked up my old drive to my Xbox 360 & the new 250GB drive to the transfer cable. Put in the transfer disk & let the Xbox move the info from the old drive to the new drive over night.

Tested it this morning & the only thing I had to do was reinstall the dashboard update, every thing else worked.

Hope this INFO helps some one & saves them time, if I new the above I would have had done this in no time.

Many thanks for the guide.

 

Thats my problem. i dont have an acutal legacy mode

 

"No ATA identify possible"

Hi Arsteve, did you find a solution to "No ATA identify possible".
I have the same error, but my motherboard recognizes my bevt drive.

WD2500BEVT
08 Dec 2009.

I have also set my SATA operation mode to ATA...still no luck.

Insanenutter or anybody, can you please let us know where we are going wrong.

many thanks in advance.

thanks