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

All you can do is buy a USB enclosure for the SSD and use it as a USB drive. Hddhackr only works with select western digital hard drives.
 
i see my drive in the list of compatible, i have the WD5000LPVT-75G33T0,
my xbox doesn't recognize the drive after "hacking it" so i tryt again and overridden my undo.bin :'( is there anyone who can help my with the bin fille for the drive. any thips on how to let is show up in the xbox? what i think is my usb is 16gb and so i formated it to fat32 instead of fat can this give me a problem, hddhackr seems to do oke
 
Sorry to be that guy... but im having trouble getting this to work.

Im using a WD5000LPLX which was on the list
hddhackr (1.40) worked fine and says it should be good to go... plug it into the xbox and it doesnt see it.
xplorer360 (and a few variants of it that i tried) can read my original 160 GB HDD and i see partitions 0,2,3 but nothing with the hacked 500 GB
I get an error that it could not find a FATX drive to open.

i redid the hddhackr thing and no dice, i've tried multiple compatibility modes for the xplorer 360, run as admin and UAC off.
Im using a dc7900 (released 2008) so i would think the sata chipset isnt too new...

After about 2 hours of google-ing and trying all the suggestions i found, i joined here to ask for help.

id like to get this to work internally rather than buy an external caddy for the drive... assuming thats even an option anymore after ive tried all this stuff...

any suggestions or help is appreciated.
 
Its probably to do with the SATA chipset in your computer, if AHCI is disabled or legacy is enabled when you have configured the SATA chipset correctly and its probably not compatible unfortunately.

However you can use up to a 2TB external hard drive with the Xbox 360 now connected via USB, so I question if hacking a drive is actually worthwhile these days. It obviously used to be when Microsoft charged £89.99 just for the 120gig drive here in the UK, at the time it was possible to make 3x 250gig drives for the same price.

Also a USB caddy for the drive will not work in regards to hacking it, however you can use it as a USB drive for the 360 without issue.
 
unfortunately both of the desktops in my house are this same model... lol so i don't have anything different to test it on.

M$ still charges an unreasonable premium for their drives... which is why i wanted to DIY it, but when i bought the HDD a few weeks ago, i wasnt aware you could hook up an external USB device that was larger than 32gb. Live and learn i guess.

With the xbox being limited to usb2.0 anyway, is there anything wrong with just using a 128 or 256GB usb stick, or is there a benefit to getting a caddy for this HDD? I would double sided tape it to the xbox to prevent it from getting knocked about...

I dont really need the space, but i determined the original HDD was getting flakey and causing my crashes by moving fallout new vegas, oblivion and skyrim to flashdrives and playing from there instead. Went from almost guaranteed crash when loading a large area after about 2-3 hours of play, to no crashes since moving those games to usb sticks several weeks ago.
 
I remember playing GTA 5 off a 64gb USB memory stick when we did an Xbox 360 lan years ago, the game worked perfectly fine and it wasn't the fastest USB drive in the world.

The benefit of a hard drive is more storage space to install games and of course you can play Xbox Classic games with an internal hard drive.
 
i forgot about the classics, my internal drive stopped playing them properly long ago. that was probably the first sign of its flakiness 3-4 years ago. But i have a regular xbox upstairs so thats not a pressing issue.

i think my plan is to plug a 256gb usb stick in the front, and try again later on this 500GB to make it internal - with classic game support. That way i can put everything on my USB drive and not worry about the current HDD finally taking its last breath before i have a replacement internal in there.

Thanks for your help.
 
InsaneNutter said:
So the drive doesn't show up as not formatted or anything?

Maybe try restoring the drive and hacking it again? your setup looks fine to me. Usually not changing from AHCI to IDE is the cause of most problems.

Also just so your aware the Xbox 360 supports up to 2TB external hard drives for installed games / save these days, so hacking a hard drive is not as essential as it once was depending on what you desire.
Click to expand...
I know this is an old thread but I'm in the same boat and didn't find a solution. The above message says wd5000lplx is tested but i don't see that in any official hddhackr documentation. anyway, i've got 1.4. i've flashed dozens of drives in the past. I picked these up because they are new and buying premade ones on ebay is probably new case, very old drive. my problem is the same i think. flash with hddss500.bin, all goes good, put in console, either a jasper or a slim and neither see the drive. i try and restore and the undo.bin is the wrong size hddhackr says. the drive works fine in windows and i'll probably just return them but they do now have hitachi labled fw lol. idk. mine were made aug 2019. has anyone actually made a lplx work? if so it must be older version. for example i have two other wd drives with the same model number, but 4 years apart and physically completley different. so not the same drive at all. so i'm guessing my WD5000LPLX is part of a series and the last 6 digits 08ZNTTO is what really matters. except there is no information out there i can find about those last digits. any insite would be great. thanks.
 
theSly said:
Did You get your LPLX working?

I'm asking because I had two of them:
The first one worked, the second one didn't...
Click to expand...
I just bought 3 made in aug 2019, they all flash but none of them show up on any 360????????? i flashed a 320gig and it works fine.
 
I'm not about scour 150+ pages to see if anyone else had this issue, but... I ran into a problem right from the start... trying to create the bootable USB drive using the HP tool. No matter what I did, it would always say the media was write protected (yet I could add/remove files from it and format it normally just fine. I could not find another program that created a bootable drive for ms-dos like this one. At best, an iso.
Then, I found out why the new Rufus didnt have the MS-DOS option like i saw in the demos.
https://github.com/pbatard/rufus/issues/545 - "Microsoft appears to have removed diskcopy.dll which is the library that contains the MS-DOS floppy image we extract the MS-DOS files. So I'll be modifying Rufus to remove MS-DOS support for Windows 10. Oh and before you ask, no it is not possible to embed the MS-DOS files in Rufus as they are copyrighted by Microsoft and can't be redistributed without a license, which is the whole reason why we had to fetch them from an existing library."
Then I found a workaround explained here - https://datacentersupport.lenovo.com/us/en/solutions/HT502597
A quick search lead me to here - https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkServer/TS-140-704A-Bios-Update/td-p/4445319 - for the files (tho later i realized i saw them from one of the other programs i tried)
Direct link for RufusPatch.zip - https://download.lenovo.com/pccbbs/thinkservers/rufuspatch.zip

I am thinking this may have something to do with why the HP bootable tool wont work. Tho I got the same write-protected error when I tried the FreeDos directory instead, so I dont know.

This is as far as I have gotten at this moment. Will update if this all works later.
 
First, on my NUC... I couldnt even get the stupid thing to boot from the USB drive (I believe because it looks like intel completely removed legacy boot from that bios)
Eventually, i was able to try on mom's laptop... success!! (for booting). Had taken out her hdd.. put in the one i was hacking... HDDhackr wouldnt see it. Best I could do in her bios was enable legacy boot, but i could not turn off uefi or w/e. There were some other settings I didnt seem to able to get to (apparently, HP hides the 'advanced' tab in bios)
So I did the manual flashing here https://digiex.net/threads/xbox-360-how-to-flash-your-hddss-bin-in-windows.8569/... as far as i know my save/restore has worked.... but how am i supposed to create these partitions if the point of this guide is hddhackr doesnt see it? Can I create them in windows? (It's hooked up via USB atm)
Dont even have access to mom's laptop now, so.. completely hosed if i cant do this in windows.. or maybe I can use a dos box now?

Edit:
I'm giving up. Was doing some back and forth between the 360 and PC (having 360 'configure' it etc) and now I dont know what's wrong. Bad sectors I think? This tool is certainly saying there's a ton.
AOMEI Partition Assistant shows 2TB unallocated (its a 500gb hdd) and gets an error every time i try to format. I dont seem to be able to format it using anything. I also tried re-flashing it in the hex tool, both to the new and to the under.bin, all i get is unable to write to sectors.
Yet i can still see the drive and copy files to/from it in file explorer
I've had it. Ive been at this for several days.. and this quick/easy solution is still nowhere near ready.
 
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I have a Xbox 360 Slim, and for some reason I put the hard drive that comes with it(250gb) in the pc and formatted it. I've tried countless times to flash it to normal. booted into the specific places and everything couldn't get it going. Any suggestions?
 
MrFunkyRight said:
I have a Xbox 360 Slim, and for some reason I put the hard drive that comes with it(250gb) in the pc and formatted it. I've tried countless times to flash it to normal. booted into the specific places and everything couldn't get it going. Any suggestions?
Click to expand...

I've never seen people having muck luck fixing an official hard drive as their not compatible with Hddhackr unfortunately.
 
Hello,
I know this might be a quite old tutorial but here is my case,
I recently lost my Xbox 360 original 250gb HDD so I decided to get a new one. I had a WD5000LPVT available for it and I wanted to give it a try.
First I had an issue making the bootable DOS USB drive. I was getting the "device is write protected" message, even if I changed the USB unit (tried around 5 different USB drives and it gave the same error), Of course I ran the program with administrator rights. I ended up using FAT32 and it worked.

Then I had an old laptop (mfg around 2011) and I installed the WD Blue 500GB HDD and my bootable drive with HDDHACKR and flashed the HDDSS500.bin file successfully (At least that is what HDDHACKR says) and told me to turn off my PC and insert the drive into the Xbox.
So I did, The drive does not show up under Storage, it just says "No storage device found".

I read the thread again and found that in some cases it might be needed to write all zeroes to drive. So I restored the UNDO.bin and gave it a try. It lasted around 2 hours to complete, I used WD DLG for that (Also included in the thread).

After writing all zeroes, I flashed the XBOX360 500GB security sector again and inserted the drive in the Xbox. Still didn't show up with "No storage device found".

I restored the UNDO.bin file and kept google-ing for more methods. I managed to find an earlier version of HDDHACKR and decided to give it a try. This time when flashing the HDDSS.bin file, I got prompted to accept partitioning the drive with 0/2/3 partitions. So I accepted. It said it was successful (lasted about 2 minutes). And I inserted the drive in the Xbox and it did not show up with "No storage device found".

After having no luck, I decided to do it from windows using the tutorial referenced in this thread, with the HEX editor. I used a computer with Windows 10, Core i5 8th gen. The HEX editor method was successful and this time I restored the partition 2 with the provided one in the main thread. (~170mb backup file) using X360 Explorer. Everything seemed fine at this moment so I inserted the drive back into the Xbox and turned it on. By now it still doesn't show up and it says "No storage device found". If I connect the drive with an enclosure cable box, it is recognized and says "unformatted". It just does not work while connected internally.

I have no other PC to run HDDHACKR with since my newer PC's chipset will not do IDE mode.

Currently, I have a 2TB Toshiba Canvio Hard Drive with my games, However, I want to give this Toshiba drive a different use and don't want to have any HDD connected externally in the console as I feel it insecure (It can fall off and damage, like happened to me in the past).

If you can give me any help It will be much appreciated.
 
Hddhackr seems to be very fussy with modern hardware, if you have a friend or family member with some older hardware you might have better luck trying to hack the drive on that.
 
InsaneNutter said:
Hddhackr seems to be very fussy with modern hardware, if you have a friend or family member with some older hardware you might have better luck trying to hack the drive on that.
Click to expand...
Thanks for the reply. When I was doing the HEX method, I did it with the drive connected thru USB since I was using a laptop, it was not possible via SATA. I noticed that before flashing, the device manager shows the drive as "WDC WD5000LPVT - <some other numbers> USB".
After doing the HEX thing, if I reconnect the drive, it still shows up as "WDC WD5000LPVT - <some other numbers> USB" like it wasn't taking the firmware, but the strange part is that if I attempt to save the sectors 16-22 and them open that backup file with the HEX editor, it says Hitachi... I am not sure what I am doing wrong.
 
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