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[scuzzell]

I don't have a 360 to test this with, but I have used a program before called Disk Investigator which will read and display the raw data on a disc. I must note though that I have never tried to read a FatX drive with this.

[drowninginjello]

Hopefully this doesn't sound too dumb, but here goes:

Since there has been mention of USB ports and external drives, and someone actually mentioned getting the games to run off of a HDD via USB as a possibility, why not a USB DVD-ROM or DVD-/+RW drive with an original 360 game as a test?

Don't own one yet, and I never buy first-run things (rule of thumb: wait till the bugs and kinks are worked-out).

Anyway, just a thought.

This post has been edited by drowninginjello: Nov 26 2005, 11:59 AM

[drowninginjello]

On another note:

Anyone who has disassembled their 360 will most likely know this. I know that M$ is using laptop drives, but am curious if a normal SATA cable can be manually attached to the controller board inside the 360 with a 3.5" SATA drive of larger sizes and formatted using the format drive option mentioned earlier?

Example:

300GB SATA attached to the controller.

IF this can be done, it wouldn't be too hard for someone with some plastic or other fab  experience to create an external case that would allow attaching the drive to the outside of the 360 case using via velcro and some cooling options + sound insulation.

But I am a madman, and again, these are my thoughts...

This post has been edited by drowninginjello: Nov 26 2005, 12:03 PM

[bucko]

QUOTE(Rustmonkey @ Nov 25 2005, 08:18 AM)

Just to let you know... if you can get another SATA laptop drive hooked up, I've noticed theres an option for the 360 to format the HDD....  Also, noticed that at least seven gig is used probabley for emulation of the orignial xbox cache files... at least that would make since, as the X360 is only able to use 13 of the 20 gig on the stock HDD...

Nice, can anyone else confirm this?

This post has been edited by bucko: Nov 26 2005, 04:15 PM

[Casper1786]

confirm what? that the "missing" 7Gig is set to the XBOX Emulator? well I really see nothing else it could be, the systems claims system files, def not Dash Files ofcourse, and some simple math here roughly hits 7Gb

Edrive is what 4.7Gb
X, Y & Z are .75Gb each so a 2.25Gb

For emulation Purposes I'm assuming that it had to Dedicate 2.25 for XYZ Drives, but i'm curious did it really need the E Drive dedicated? Has any1 Tryed changing the size of the E Drive on XBOX to see what would happen, i'm assuming either not, or it just did nothing and crashed, I'd be a little annoyed if I had to give up that 4.7Gb for XBOX Emulation if I never planned on Using it, so I'd rather have it Joined together instead of split up. next comes my question to custom soundtracks for XBOX games on the 360, I don't think any of the games i have off the BC list have Soundtrack support, but how did they input that feature? Point is that the 7 Gig area has no other purpose but to be the XBOX Emulator location

That means 7Gb of the drive is in a FatX File system, but the other partition(s) don't have to Follow

[frieko]

Yeah it's kinda silly to include a full sized Edrive,  xbox games only need a few megs for TDATA/UDATA. They only start bitching when E gets upwards of 95% full of... unrelated materials?

[Rustmonkey]

QUOTE(bucko @ Nov 26 2005, 07:45 AM)

Nice, can anyone else confirm this?

Just go to your system menu all the way to the right and inspect the storage device options.  When you select the HDD, it will ask you if you'd like to format, and I believe erase or some other option... I'm at work right now and can't look

[Jonolche]

I have been looking over the xbox 360 Hard Drive Hex's and it seems to look like there is 2 partitions, Im guessing one for saves, one for xbox emulation. It makes sence since MS would make there own emulator. Later on if someone got there hands on the sc for the emulator, we could create the ultimate xbox-pc emulator

Someone said that even if we maganaged to crack it, The problem will still be with SATA price, Like i stated in my first post in this fourm, get a converter, Or better yet get one, cut it open, and see if its just a basic re-arangeing of the wires. Im not gunna attempt that yet, I still have a couple more tests to do before I destroy it.

Also the 7 gigs could be used by emulator, xbox live connection info, and something like system information( explanes why when I connected my hard drive to my friends xbox and visa-vesa, 360 made us connect to xbox live to use/see xbox-live marketplace pictures, trailers that we downloaded)

UPDATE::: I got my hands on a SATA Drive and connected it to my xbox, It dose not detect it at all. It could require some files on it... I dont know. So I tried connecting my 360 hard drive to my origional xbox w/ Xcuter-3 and it cannot read it. My guess for this is that M$ got smart and made up something to protect the data from being red. Im getting afree xbox 360 hard drive, so ill see whats on it without connecting it to and xbox 360 (useing PC, then XBOX if no luck). DON'T GIVE UP!!!

The best way to upgrade the hard drive, i think, will be to use the USB MASS STORAGE attempt to deliver a hack, crash the os, then, install another dashboard, then copy the contents of the hard drive to a USB drive, Plug in the USB Drive into a computer, then copying the files to another, larger, harddrive. Then makeing the Partions to look like the origonal 360.

This post has been edited by Jonolche: Nov 27 2005, 12:02 AM

[TheMasterChef]

I think the odds are that 360 hdds are locked with a universal key, that is, one that is the same for all.

('M$ would never allow use of unlocked hdds' + 'You can swap your 360's hdd with your friend's = Universal key.)

Unless they're using something other than the normal locking method.

QUOTE

(rule of thumb: wait till the bugs and kinks are worked-out).

-not good logic in this business - the older the XBOX1, no, the older the console, the easier it is to hack. The price, however...

QUOTE

That means 7Gb of the drive is in a FatX File system, but the other partition(s) don't have to Follow

, the 360 hdd doesn't have to have any FATX at all, the emulator will be running on the XBOX360 OS which will have an API for whatever filesystem they're using now.

QUOTE

So I tried connecting my 360 hard drive to my origional xbox w/ Xcuter-3 and it cannot read it.

, you wired it up to a SATA-IDE converter, I presume.
___

The 360 loads its dashboard from something other than the hard-drive, of this we are sure are there doesn't have to be a hard-drive for it to boot to dashboard.

M$ learned a while ago that releasing hardware with flashable BIOSs is a bad idea (1.6, anyone?). I'm betting that this time round M$ will have spent some time making this impossible for the 360. So to modify the dashboard a replacement BIOS will be needed --> modchip. (No softmods.) I think I read somewhere that the dashboard is loaded from the CPUs somehow, in which case we're pwned as far as getting the thing to load straight into...Evox360, is concerned.

As for 360 hard-drives, has anyone yet cloned one to another hard-drive (both of them official XBOX360 drives) and tried that in the console?

This post has been edited by TheMasterChef: Nov 27 2005, 02:04 AM

[wolrahnaes]

QUOTE(TheMasterChef @ Nov 26 2005, 07:34 PM)

I think the odds are that 360 hdds are locked with a universal key, that is, one that is the same for all.

('M$ would never allow use of unlocked hdds' + 'You can swap your 360's hdd with your friend's = Universal key.)

It's already been stated many times that the hard drive is completely unlocked.  It works just like it should when plugged in to a PC, but we don't know the filesystem yet.

There'd be no point to a universal key.  Sure, most users don't have the technology to extract the key, but if it's universal it only takes one person to break it, and the Xbox has proven how many people have how much tech at their disposal.

edit: If anyone has dumped the contents of their drive, please get ahold of me.  I can't afford to buy a 360 right now due to car-related expenses, but I want to investigate the drive's format.  I'd like to have at least two drive images from different boxes, preferably without saves on them, but I'm not picky.

This post has been edited by wolrahnaes: Nov 27 2005, 05:00 AM

[soulbadguy]

ok i am definitly not a specialist  neither got a x360 but just got an idea...
assuming the file system only  store meta-data on the beginning of the drive (most FS that M$ use does... i think) by the fact that the partion table seem to be pretty standard (if pc software can read it it should be ) it should be possible to modifie it in order to reflect the geometrie of a new drive (a larger one) just by changing the sector begining/end; number...
here what i suggest... copy raw data of the drive of a x360 using dd under linux for example...  the write it on another drive.... then use cfdisk of fdisk for changing the partion range of the lastest partion on the drive ...
this technic (if it work ) will be highly risky ... and seema bit useless as someone said it is allready possible to format a drive on a xbox 360...
sorry for my poor english and keep going guy...

[willpower101]

I have the tiger development osX running on my intel box. do you think we would get any different results hooking up the sata hard drive to that? has anyone tried it?

I have a premium to work with, i just don't want to waste time if it's already been tried so i can move on.

[mr. newbie]

if u plug into a pc can u add files?

[TheSpecialist]

QUOTE(mr. newbie @ Nov 27 2005, 11:56 AM)

if u plug into a pc can u add files?

No. Nobody yet understands the filestructure. But what you CAN do is make a HD dump, zip it, upload it somewhere, so also people that still don't have a 360 can start analyzing it (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) After we understand the filestructure we can build software to read/write files to the disc with a PC and hopefully replace the drive with a bigger one.

This post has been edited by TheSpecialist: Nov 27 2005, 04:48 PM

[Avenger 2.0]

It's possible the Xbox 360 reads out an unique key from the Harddisk flash or eeprom (since the HD isn't a retail disk from Samsung). That way you could swap you HD with other Xboxes, but don't connect a cheap HD from yourself. And it would even be very difficult to crack (just as difficult as making a normal dvd-drive read xbox dvd's).

This post has been edited by Avenger 2.0: Nov 27 2005, 05:00 PM