1. Can I replace my Xboxs SATA hard drive?No. This M$ HDDs ship with some encrypted data already written to the disk. This encrypted data appears to be a hash of the HDDs own model & serial number, signed with a key known only to M$.
more info
2. Can I connect a hard drive to my 360 using USB?Yes. If a hard drive is connected to your 360 via USB it will only be able to store music and pictures. Anything else like themes, demos, trailers and XBLA games require a M$ hard drive.
3. Can I view/dump files on my 360 hard drive?Yes. To do this you need either
xplorer360 or
wxhdd and will have to connect your hard drive to your PC. You will need to take apart your hard drive to be able to do this. An
adaptor for the 360 hard drive is in the works.
4. Can I view/dump files off of an original 360 game disc?Yes. To do this you will need a program called wxripper, a pc with a DVD drive (may need to be taken apart and a DVD movie over 7.5 GB. More info can be found
here. 5. Can I burn these dumps and play them on my 360?No. Xbox games are on a special type of media that is different than a regular dvd-r. dvd-rs have specific information written to them in the factory to identify them as recordable media. Game discs have similar info to define them as an original disc.
6. If I can play game demos off the hard drive, doesnt that mean I could copy a dump of any game to that demos folder and rename the xex?No. demo games are signed to only be able to run off of the hard drive. Regular games are signed to only be able to run off of xbox-dvd media. If they are not on the the right type of the media they will not be able to run.
7. If updates are administered by XBL couldnt we just fake a live server and have the Xbox update with our own dashboard?No. First of all, there is no XDK/SDK out right now so it is not possible to develop any type of applications for the 360, and regular Xbox apps wouldnt run on a 360. Secondly, even if someone did manage to get a dashboard onto the flash chip it wouldnt be signed by M$ so the hyper visor wouldnt let it run and it would be spit back put with an error.
8. Can I use one of the MA/007/SC gamesave exploits to run unsigned code on my Xbox?No. The gamesave exploits on the original Xbox were triggeredby using a buffer overflow. the 360 has massive amounts of protection against this.
Can't you just brute force the encryption to get the key private key out?
well you can but you wouldnt live to see it, nor would your children or you childrens children, nor would your childrens childrens childrens....... repeat for about 100-200 years (and i mean just adding a new 'children' to the end of the sentance, NO BREAK ether). so the reality is NO WE CANT REALLY USE IT AS A VIABLE OPTION