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

Dark Scyth said:
From what I know at the moment, no one has even been banned from having a modded Hard Drive. Though that isn't saying its not possible for them to make an update in the future to ban these, though the chances are slim.
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I wonder if MS will think twice about doing this due to the Anti-Trust case that is happening with Datel. Just think about it... we are just formatting a 250gb hard drive for use with the 360 because you can't even buy them without plumping for a console as well (ie the MW2 special edition box).

The price that Microsoft charges for their official drives should be an Anti-Trust case all on its own... sheer daylight robbery. If I was to take a DVD player and put it in a fancy box and call it a SuperDuper DVD player and then charge 4 times the cost of it and not let anyone else make DVD players I would be called a pirate... this is exactly what Microsoft is doing with the 360 hard drives. They take ordinary hard drives, add a little bit of software formatting to the drive and then put it in a special box and selling it for 4 times the cost.

It's ironic when Microsoft are death on pirates when they are doing piracy themselves. Considering they want us to buy DLC that is taking up more and more space these days and then wondering why we go out and mod our own OEM drives that are IDENTICAL to what they use. Installing games to the hard drive reduces wear on the DVD drive and stops the hairdryer noise in the bargain... If you don't want to keep having to uninstall games every time you get a new one you need AT LEAST a 250gb drive...

If they deactivate these drives I will be one amongt many who will egg on the brave souls who will be suing Microsoft. I won't be among them due to the fact is that I can't afford it... like I can't afford the stupid price of the Microsoft Official Hard Drives... that is if they bloody well sold them in the first place. Ironic eh?
 
Great tutorial! ! ! I have a question though can i only use up to 250 gb hd or can i go higher ? Say for instance a 320gb? Thanks
 
GREASERS1 said:
Great tutorial! ! ! I have a question though can i only use up to 250 gb hd or can i go higher ? Say for instance a 320gb? Thanks
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This has been answered several times, the answer is no. In order for there to be a bigger hard drive to be for 360 Microsoft would have to officially release one, which they haven't. You can only mod a 20GB, 60GB, 120GB, and 250GB.
 
Ok, since I'm the paranoid type, I'm going to throw this question out one last time before I proceed with this excellent HDD hack:

Is anyone aware of anyone having their XBL account banned for using a non-MS hard drive?

Everything I can find online only mentions the DVD-ROM firmware hack being targetted. A few newspaper articles mention things off-hand like "apparently even using non-MS hard drives will get you banned" but none of the authors are techie-types or have first-hand knowledge (so I'm thinking MS scare tactic just to sell a few more HDDs at 300% markup). I'm all set to do this because I'm buying all kinds of DLC and even the full-game digital downloads and need the additional space, so it would seem pretty dumb for MS to buy me for wanting to buy MORE content from them, even if I'm not using their stupid HDD.

Thanks all...
 
No you won't get banned.

And to my problem:
My drive is not getting recognized: No ata drives present or "No ATA identify possible"

Is it because the drive was manufactured in 2010?
 
Hi Annie,

I was having that same problem because I forgot to right click on Xplorer360 and select "Run as Administrator". Once I did that it detected the FATX drive no problem. The other hiccup I had was trying to drag-and-drop my content folder onto the 250gig drive (wouldn't let me) using Xplorer360 250 gig version. I just had to turn off the UAC in Windows 7 and now it's copying over no problems.

Already tried the drive in the 360 though and it works like a charm. This tutorial is awesome and saved me over $100 CDN!
 
And the drive I used (which I purchased this afternoon) was manufactured on Jan. 8, 2010, so I don't think that's your problem.
 
What? Why in xplorer 360? I was talking about the flashing process in DOS, where it isn't recognized by hddhackr.

Do I have to format the drive before flashing it or something else I forgot? Never read anything about xplorer 360 related to the flash before. I thought you just need that to back up your data from old drives or something.
 
Hey Nutter,

People are asking the same 5 questions to the same 5 problems... just a suggestion, you should begin the tutorial with a FAQ section in the very beginning written in big red capital letters or something. This post is getting to big, and people get too lazy.
 
When googling around to figure out how to do this upgrade I found a poorly written post on another forum (can't remember where sorry) which claimed that formatting their new 250gb drive (presumably via system settings on the xbox 360) had caused them to be banned. This seems utterly stupid but I just wanted to check: has anyone tried this?

edit: I have tried formatting an unofficial 250gb drive now and, of course, I didn't get banned.
 
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MattF said:
When googling around to figure out how to do this upgrade I found a poorly written post on another forum (can't remember where sorry) which claimed that formatting their new 250gb drive (presumably via system settings on the xbox 360) had caused them to be banned. This seems utterly stupid but I just wanted to check: has anyone tried this?
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I did the upgrade using these instructions and it works perfectly. I did not find any confirmed banning of the DIY hard drive upgrade via Google. The only instances I did find is when the XBox itself is modded and becomes banned. You can still use the hard drive off the banned XBox and use it in a new XBox just fine.

Common sense would lead us to believe that if they aren't even banning the actual hard drives off of banned modded XBoxes, then a DIY hard drive upgrade is safe to do without any consequences. Besides, if MS were banning these DIY upgraded hard drives, then there would be plenty of warnings that you would find online from the thousands of people that have performed this upgrade themselves.
 
Thanks osudesi.

So I just did the hard drive upgrade. Xbox recognises it with no issues, but none of the content from partition 3 that i transferred is there. Any ideas? The tutorial is not particularly clear on the specifics of this (no offense to the author). I used the 'extract' command in xplorer to copy the content folder onto my pc's hard drive. I then used the inject folder command to put that same folder back into partition3 on the new drive.

edit: works now, turns out xplorer wasn't putting the files where I thought it was. It seems to insert a folder always in the root of the current partition and not the current folder, no matter where you right click to start the process (drag and drop doesn't work). As an aside, has anyone come up with a procedure to copy the mass effect 2 files yet (perhaps similar to the forza 3 method)?
 
I havnt tried mass effect 2 but i have read elsewhere that the forza 3 method works for it too.

I just did this process starting feb 3rd 2010 so this process works as of that date. This is the best guide that I found but I ran into a few snags so I am posting the solutions to help others have a smoother experience.

Delete as much unneeded stuff off your hard drive, free DLC, installed games, things that you can redownload later, the process isnt that fast and only having to copy a couple gigs of data from my 20GB was a lot easier then the first time i tried an had 11GB. Though this will create empty folders that will show up during the transfer process but they dont need to be transferred.

When you take the old hard drive out of the case there is a spring that holds the latch, mine shot across the room and i almost lost it, so be careful.

When using hddhackr on my computer it would only recognize the new drive when connected to sata port 0, all other ports it wouldnt see it. Also my computers printer has an SD card slot that it was trying to boot to and wouldnt boot to my usb stick until i disconnected my printer, so if you have issues disconnect everything else while on the hddhackr part.

You need to restore the partition 2 in order for it to work, I thought i dont play xbox1 games i wont do it, but it wont recognize any files unless partition 2 is restored, you can use xport 360 from datel to do these folder manually if the image restore isnt working.

The system content folder(the one with all 0s) is very touchy and i had to do folders one at a time for it to not crash and wipe out whatever progress i had made.
 
Hi, I have WD Scorpio blue WD2500BEVT and i made everything like in the turtorial and my xbox doesent see my hard drive . :( What shoud i do any ideas ?


Regards
Kamil
 
I've got it .. When I flash my hdd the hddhackr ask for "Making partition 0,2,3" when i press yes its make partition but then it changes LBA size and then xbox doesn't see Hdd , when i press No everything is ok my xbox see 228GB of space :)

I have Nforce 405 chipset and i think that the chipset is guilty !

regards
Kamil
 
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