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

larkesken64 said:
Hello everyone,
I've been trying like crazy to get a Hitachi 500GB HDD to work with my Xbox 360 E, but I haven't been able to get it to show up at all.
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That's the problem unfortunately, you can't use Hitachi drives, Hddhackr is only compatible Western Digital hard drives.

You could however put the drive in a USB caddy and use it as a USB drive, that will pretty much let you do everything except play backwards compatible original Xbox games these days.

You can actually use up to 2TB usb drives now, compared to the maximum of 512gb for internal drives. So theirs less of an incentive to hack a drive for internal use now, compared to historically when this was the only real option to greatly increase the Xbox 360's storage capacity.
 
CitrusBab said:
Skimmed through this tutorial a year ago and downloaded the instructions as well as the required resources for a 500gb drive.
tested this method finally a couple of weeks ago with an old Hitachi 500gb HDD as well as a brand new WD Blue 500gb SSD (WDS500G2B0A).
I followed the instructions in an attempt to get the SSD to hack but to no avail.
The Hitachi HDD worked like a charm using the exact same method and now has my whole legit 360 library on it.
I'm guessing there's a reason the SSD doesn't work.
I'm not expecting a new method of hacking any time soon, but what I'd like to know is why the SSD did not take.
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@InsaneNutter thank you for the response, but from this post I was under the impression some Hitachi drives were able to work with this method. Is it just hit or miss for each drive manufacturer?
 
No Hitachi drives will work with Hddhackr, some original 360 drives were Hitachi which you might have seen in some screenshots, however its only possible to hack Western Digital hard drives.
 
InsaneNutter said:
No Hitachi drives will work with Hddhackr, some original 360 drives were Hitachi which you might have seen in some screenshots, however its only possible to hack Western Digital hard drives.
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Okay, thanks for the clarification. I appreciate your work!
 
@InsaneNutter Hello, first off like others here I want to say that your work in keeping this thread up to date and helping others is much appreciated. I'm not sure where to post my problem, but it is slightly different but still related to making a new drive work on the 360.

I have an original non slim XBOX360 with a 20GB HDD that recently failed and could not be recognized by my XBOX or on my PC through FatXplorer. I took it to a data recovery service, and they said that the problem was a severe firmware issue. They also said that they should be able to clone the failed drive onto a new one that I provide, though they don't have much experience working with XBOX360's.

My question is, for the best compatibility, should I order an original XBOX360 HDD (thinking of getting one bigger than 20GB)? Or can I get any regular WD hard drive (500GB max for an internal drive unless I'm mistaken)?

Finally, if the regular WD hard drive is the best way to proceed, do I provide the drive to them as is and let them do the cloning? Or do I need to follow the steps in this thread to format the drive beforehand?

Thanks again, and sorry if this is a bit off topic!
 
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You can use any of the Western Digital hard drives listed as compatible in the original post, that said you need a device capable of hacking the drive with Hddhackr, which is not always easy on modern hardware. The only device that would work when I last attempted to hack a hard drive was an old Netbook I had from 2008.

The most important thing is really to extract the data from the hard drive, if the recovery company can do that for you, then you can inject that back in to an internal harddrive for the Xbox 360 you either purchase or hack, or even a usb drive configured for use in the Xbox 360.

Even if you follow the process in this guide and hack a drive, if the recovery company images that drive and restores the image to your newly hacked drive I suspect the new drive either A) won't work in the 360 or B) you will be limited to 20gb usable space as they have resorted a 20gb partition 3 from the original hard drive. If they did that you could always extract the data and re partition the drive with hddhackr, then copy the data back.
 
InsaneNutter said:
You can use any of the Western Digital hard drives listed as compatible in the original post, that said you need a device capable of hacking the drive with Hddhackr, which is not always easy on modern hardware. The only device that would work when I last attempted to hack a hard drive was an old Netbook I had from 2008.

The most important thing is really to extract the data from the hard drive, if the recovery company can do that for you, then you can inject that back in to an internal harddrive for the Xbox 360 you either purchase or hack, or even a usb drive configured for use in the Xbox 360.

Even if you follow the process in this guide and hack a drive, if the recovery company images that drive and restores the image to your newly hacked drive I suspect the new drive either A) won't work in the 360 or B) you will be limited to 20gb usable space as they have resorted a 20gb partition 3 from the original hard drive. If they did that you could always extract the data and re partition the drive with hddhackr, then copy the data back.
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Thanks so much for the quick reply! If I am able to find an original XBOX360 HDD to transfer the new data over rather than one of those WD hard drives, would the process be easier? For example, if I bought a 120GB XBOX drive then gave it to them without doing anything else, even if the recovery makes it only have 20GB usable space, would I be able to use an XBOX transfer cable, hook it up to my PC and extract data using something like FatXplorer rather than having to find old hardware and using Hddhackr?
 
To be honest you could give them any drive to transfer the data over to, the drive might not work on the 360 that way, however you could still hook it up to a PC and use any of the FATX tools to read the drive.
 
Hi everyone, I have a question tho... I try to conect an xbox360 hdd of 2TB on Party buffalo and when I try to read the date from it I receive an "unhandeled exception"... I want to mention that I connect first time 1TB and everything was working perfect. I don't know what to do to recognise my 2tb hdd that have been formated in xbox360 (Glitched). Maybe someone can point me into an fatx explorerr more then Xport, Party buffalo, Horizon, XBox360Commander and Xplorer360.
 
I believe no 2TB 2.5" drive was small enough to fit inside the 360 at the time these tools we're created, so its possible such a large drive is not supported.

Have you tried FATXplorer? the 3.0 beta is currently free to use, so you could try that out and see if it works for you.
 
@InsaneNutter
Thanks mate, I used your recommandation of FATXplorer 3.0 and it worked perfectly. I will be very happy when the final version will arive and buy it. Its a very useful app not only for Xbox niche but for all that requires opening FATX and others. Thanks again for help. Cheers.
 
[QUOTE = "InsaneNutter, post: 84389, membro: 2"] Nenhuma unidade Hitachi funcionará com Hddhackr, algumas unidades 360 originais eram Hitachi que você pode ter visto em algumas imagens, no entanto, só é possível hackear discos rígidos Western Digital. [/ CITAR]

Que triste, mas para título de curiosidade, ano passado eu testei um HD HITACHI 500GB num Case Externo USB e o meu XBOX 360 reconheceu o HD. Eu fiquei feliz e formatei o HD, mas a alegria duro pouco, pois quando eu copiei o JUST DANCE 2018 do meu Pendrive SANDISK para o HD ele travou e depois disso, o XBOX ainda reconhecia o HD, mas não conseguia formata-lo, sempre dava erro. Eu vou tentar Hackear ele com os tutoriais daqui e vê o que acontece...
 

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Hi guys. I'm new here and I signed up so I could ask for some help as I've had some success but I'm not quite there. I've never tried this before so please be patient with me. I decided to have a go at hacking a HDD for use with the 360 and followed the guide as well as I could.
I got hold of a Western Digital 250GB drive (WD2500BEKT) for the purpose and I downloaded the appropriate HDDSS.bin for the 250 drive. Couldn't get anywhere on my modern laptop so I dug out an old XP machine (which I was very surprised to find still works).
The drive was connected via SATA while I used a boot disk to get to a DOS prompt and used HDDHackr v1.4 to flash the HDDSS.bin to sectors 16-22 of the drive and I accepted the prompt to create partitions 0/2/3.
Then I booted into windows to use Xplorer 360 Extreme 2 to write Partition 2 which seemed to go fine (note - on different attempts I did this with either Hoffman's partition from this site and with a backup of a partition 2 from an authentic 360 drive I already have). This part of the process was done via the USB transfer cable as I needed to reattach the SATA to the PC's own HDD to get into windows, I didn't have a second SATA connector available. In any case, it seemed to go fine.
However, the end result is that If I plug the newly hacked drive into the top of my 360, it doesn't see the drive at all but it can see it if connected using the USB transfer cable and I can transfer files between the original drive and the 360.
It seems I'm close, I just don't understand why the 360 can't see it when it's attached directly.
While troubleshooting this I did confirm that the drive enclosure's connector still works by trying the authentic drive in it again and the 360 saw it with no trouble. So it's definitely something to do with my hacked WD drive.
Has anybody encountered this before and do you know how to resolve it?
Thanks in advance for any advice.
 
Its possibly the SATA chipset in the old machine causing the drive not to be hacked correctly, even thought it looks like it has been. I have seen this issue come up from time to time, Hddhackr is very fussy.

Perhaps try hack the drive again and see if the 360 recognises it before restoring Partition 2.
 
InsaneNutter said:
Its possibly the SATA chipset in the old machine causing the drive not to be hacked correctly, even thought it looks like it has been. I have seen this issue come up from time to time, Hddhackr is very fussy.

Perhaps try hack the drive again and see if the 360 recognises it before restoring Partition 2.
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Thanks for the advice. i went back to hddhackr to restore the undo.bin then reflash the hddss.bin and I noticed that it wasn't v1.4 that I had at all, but v1.22! I must have got it from an older thread on this site. SI made sure I downloaded the v1.4 and for good measure re-downloaded the hdss.bin for 250GB and tried again.
The flash worked perfectly, I went straight to the xbox and the xbox found the drive with no trouble.

Thanks for your help, even if it was my own fault for not checking that I had the right version of hddhackr!
 
I thought I'd share my story with a WD5000LPVT that I had a hell of a time getting to work.

I had tried 4 different computers trying to flash the 500GB security sectors files, and it would never stick properly, never would be detected by the Xbox 360. After a lot of back and forth, and referencing dumped firmwares from a WD5000BPVT that did flash successfully and worked in an Xbox 360, I discovered something interesting.

Hddhackr 1.40 seemed to not be writing the security sectors properly, as when I would reflashed the 500GB security sectors, the resulting undo.bin (backup) file was a little bit messed up. I'll upload a zip file with the firmware from the LPVT (badflash.bin) and the good working firmware from the BPVT (BPVTFIRM.BIN).

The most obvious sign of the bad flash was directly seen in Hddhackr as well, the serial number of the flashed drive would show as a slightly truncated serial number of the original firmware, instead of the 500GB security sector's serial of J2260056GD9SXC.

I took a complete shot in the dark and decided I would just flash the BPVT firmware over to the LPVT, and this luckily worked. My only guess as to why that worked instead of just flashing the security sector is that the code that flashes the whole firmware versus just the security sectors worked differently on this drive, enough so to write everything properly and we get the correct serial and the drive showing up in the Xbox 360.

My hunch is that this is similar to what may be happening with other drives, like the WD5000LPLX that is mentioned as troublesome on the main post.

I'm not going to encourage anyone with trouble flashing their 500GB WD drives to use the BPVT firmware I'm sharing here, as I have no idea if the firmwares of flashed compatible drives should be identical for same drive sizes, but if you're willing to take a risk, you at least know my experience here.
 

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Hi InsaneNutter & Community.

I was able to get the WD 500GB LPLX drive to work (partially, as a 320GB drive).
Maybe the data below will help someone. Thanks for your hard work.

SUMMARY :
____SUCCESS (Partial) with WD5000LPLX
____HDDSS500.BIN flash : FAIL
____HDDSS320.BIN flash : SUCCESS
WHY a 320GB flash onto a 500GB drive ??
My XBox 360 S does NOT recognize the HDD when flashed with the 500GB security sector, but DOES recognize the HDD perfectly when flashed with 320GB security sector.
Educated Guess :
Western Digital probably made some changes in the architecture of the drive itself over the years. So some LPLX models work; some don't; based probably on year of manufacture or the subversion (the numbers after the dash).

SPECS :
Console : XBox 360 S (Slim)
PC : Laptop Dell E6510
BIOS : SATA port running in ATA mode with Legacy boot
Main OS : Windows 7 x64 SP1 installed in ATA/Legacy mode
USB : Generic 2GB MicroSD Card in a USB Adapter - doesn't really matter
HDD Information :
____Physical Drive Model: WD5000LPLX-75ZNTT0. 500GB. 7200RPM.
____Manufacture Date 22 OCT 2015.
____hddhackr v1.40 shows that the HDDSS320.BIN is actually from a SEAGATE Drive? (ST9320325AS)(5400RPM, 3Gbps, According to Google)
____Similarly, the HDDSS500.BIN flashes the firmware to HITACHI (HTS547550A9E384)(5400RPM, 3Gbps, According to Google)
____So with both the 320GB and 500GB Xbox360 firmwares, we lose HDD speed. Lower RPM. Lower SATA throughput. Sad. :(
____Recommendation :
____LONG TERM storage on a large EXTERNAL HDD / SSD / Flash Drive.
____SHORT TERM storage on the internal HDD. Main Performance Bottleneck will likely be the interface (Internal 3000 Mbps over SATA 2.x, vs External 480 Mbps over USB 2.0). Although some say that an external flash storage (USB flash drive / SSD) is still faster? (Unknown. Will test.)


FLASH METHOD :

What DID (finally) Work :

Followed the guide with hddhackr v1.40 to flash HDDSS320.BIN onto the 500GB drive.
Just booted up into the USB, ran hddhackr 1.40, selected the HDD, flashed the HDDSS320.BIN, confirmed, let it finish, and pressed / held down the power button to turn it off.
No need to create partitions after the flash.
hddhackr 1.40 did NOT auto-shutdown or auto-restart.
After shutdown, plugged the HDD into XBox. Done.

What did NOT work :

1. At first, I used hddhackr v1.40 to try and flash HDDSS500.BIN onto my WD 500GB LPLX drive. The backup 'dump' failed. Bad sign. But I decided to risk it and try the flash since the UNDO.BIN would be created anyway. hddhackr said that the flash was successful, and an UNDO.BIN was created. HOWEVER, XBOX 360S wouldn't recognize it. So I tried to REVERSE the process. Well, trying to 'restore' UNDO.BIN failed. Trying to 'flash' UNDO.BIN also failed. What was also weird was that hddhackr v1.40 showed that the 'Manufacturer' and 'Serial Number' were changed from Western Digitial to HITACHI, but the 'Firmware Revision' was still Western Digital (WHAT?!)

2. So I tried ALL other versions of hddhackr that I could find to restore the UNDO.BIN (hddhackr versions 1.22, 1.25, 1.30, and 1.40). The Restore option failed. The Flash option also failed. Depending on whether I chose the 'Restore' or 'Flash' option, the ERROR would be either that the UNDO.BIN's File Size, or the Checksum, was wrong.

3. So I said that there's no going back. I can only go forward. Sorry, I don't know which hddhackr version worked, but eventually, the 'Firmware Revision' changed from Western Digital's original firmware to the Hitachi firmware from HDDSS500.BIN. But STILL the XBox wouldn't recognize it. I could see the partitions in Xplorer 360 (You'll need msvcr71.dll in the same folder as the Xplorer .exe in order to make it work in Win7 x64 SP1 - you can get it from the Xport 360 application on gtatemp (https://gbatemp.net/download/xport-360.12561/download) ), but the partitions themselves were empty (is that normal?). In Windows and Linux, the disk was blank. Just for testing, I even created a brand new Partition Table with FDISK.EXE (Found in FreeDOS x86) and a FAT32 Partition with FORMAT.COM (Found in Windows ME)(Why WinME? Because the Bootable USB Creator Tool in the guide uses a WinME Emergency Disk format). Still, XBox would NOT recognize it. It's like there were parallel file structures - one that the XBox can see, and one that a PC can see, but they don't seem to conflict? Weird.

4. In any case, I couldn't go back to Original state and use the drive with fast specs (7200RPM; 6Gbps; Original WD Firmware) in a PC because the UNDO.BIN created by hddhackr 1.40 was corrupt, and going forward to an XBox format (5400RPM; 3Gbps; 500GB Hitachi Firmware) was also useless since it wouldn't recognize it. I was STUCK in between.

5. BREAKTHROUGH - Then I remembered the ERROR messages when trying to restore/flash the UNDO.BIN - wrong file size / bad checksum. I also remembered that some larger 750GB drives can be flashed down to 500GB with HDDSS500.BIN. So I thought that maybe WD did something with the architecture and there's a mismatch with the PHYSICAL layout of the drive. So I decided to downgrade the 500GB to 320GB ... and VOILA! ... SUCCESS!!

Hope this helped people with WD 500GB LPLX drives.
The problem (I think) is not HDDHackr.
The problem (I think) is not your XBox.
The problem (I think) is Western Digital changing the internal hardware and subversions of the drive, while still keeping the base model number (WD5000LPLX) the same.

InsaneNutter said:
Thank you for the feedback, I've added the drive to the compatibility post on the first page. Cheers!
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vex said:
Just bought a 500gb LPLX drive. Has anyone got this variant of the Scorpio working or did I just waste $50 on ebay. :(
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Justin Paone said:
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.
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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...
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Thank you for creating the HDD hack .I just flashed a 320GB hdd to replace the 20gb in my aging xbo360

What would be the most seamless way to transfer all the profiles and saved games from the old hDD to the newly flashed one?
 
epicurean said:
What would be the most seamless way to transfer all the profiles and saved games from the old hDD to the newly flashed one?
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Most seamless? the data transfer cable as you can then copy from one hard drive to another, using the Xbox 360 console: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Official-Xbox-Hard-Drive-Transfer/dp/B003S3RJZU

Most practical? just copy the data to your PC with FATXplorer, Party Buffalo Drive Explorer or an equivalent tool, then back to the new hard drive.
 
Hello! I am happy to see that over a decade later some of these 360 hacks are still supported. I am really appreciative of your consistency in keeping this thread up and putting all of this together. You continue to respond to new questions and new people who come by asking for help.

I am running into an issue when using the same exact drive you have pictured at the beginning of the tutorial. It is the WD Scorpio Blue WD2500BEVT with a firmware version of 01.01A01 my model number is WD2500BEVT-80A23T0

I can bootup hddhackr and follow all the prompts as described in your tutorial. Sectors rewrite, partition is created successfully, but I get Bad/wrong Modelnumber offset! in green text. It doesn't show in the xplorer 360 program and is not detected on the 360 itself. I have used two different computers with different chipsets and am not getting the right message at the end of "power off and wait..."

Any suggestions here?

view
 

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