QUOTE(PedrosPad @ Jan 24 2006, 11:52 AM)
But for the interim, my £1.99
USB 2.0 External Case for 3.5" SATA/IDE Hard Drive arrived last night.
It comes with a myriad of cables, so Im hopeful one will allow connection to the X360s 2.5 HDD.
(An external USB connection may prove a more
maintainable solution for more than just laptop owners! Ill post back results.)
I plan on using the anandtech tutorial on
Disassembling the Xbox 360 HDD unit, and hope to attempt the wire up shortly.
Update:
Got this all working over the weekend.
I used the anandtech tutorial on
Disassembling the Xbox 360 HDD unit and it was very clear. I couldnt find a Torx T12
anywere online or off
. So I purchased this
8pc Folding Tamper Proof Star Key Wrench for the needed T6 & T7, and found that the included T10 worked fine in place of the elusive T12
(it was needed to unscrew the 4 black screws holding the shielding to the drive).
Connected the X360 HDD into my
USB 2.0 External Case for 3.5" SATA/IDE Hard Drive and booted
g4u Ghost 4 Unix. Contrary to my finding posted previously, this time it
did find all my USB connected drives, including the X360 HDD with the alien disk format.
However, g4u is intended to use an FTP connection to save the image of a hard drive, and I recall reading that imaging the 20GB X360 HDD
disk-to-disk takes around 40 minutes with the Linux dd command
. The time it was going to take to FTP the image, especially over my laptops 802.11g Wifi, filled me with dread.
I recalled that the native hard disk format of my Linksys
NSLU2 NAS unit is the Linux ext3 format. I dragged one of its USB connected ext3 formatted drives downstairs to the laptop, and plugged it in next to where the X360 HDD was connected. I still hoped to use the g4u boot CD, but directly use the Linux dd command. No joy.
I expect the g4u distribution contains the dd command, but I couldnt find it or launch it.
.
Next, following a suggestion further up this thread, I tried booted the Linux!Live
KNOPPIX CD. This too found all the connected USB drives
, and being a full Linux distribution, I had no trouble launching the dd command. I opened a terminal window from nice KNOPPIX GUI desktop, and used the following command sequence to image the USB connected X360 HDD (ubb1) to the USB connected ext3 formatted HDD (ubb2).
CODE
su
mount o remount,rw /mnt/ubb2a
dd if=/dev/ubb1 of=/mnt/ubb2a/Temp/X360HDD.img
(The middle remount command was necessary as the Live KNOPPIX CD mounts all volumes as read-only by default! increasing my confidence that the X360 HDD wouldnt get corrupted.)After disconnecting the X360 HDD, I rebooted into Windows XP with the Linux ext3 disk still connected. I used the very good
ext2ifs utility to access Linux drive from Windows and dragged the 20GB X360HDD.img file onto my NTFS drive for examination. I've run the released
X360HDD image tools on the image, and it seems to read fine, and I successfully extracted a couple of the files.
I've yet to connect the X360 HDD back to the X360. Before I do so, and now that I've taken a
safe image of the X360 HDD, I plan to attempt to short cut the process using HexWorkshop or WinHex to image the HDD. I'll diff the resultant image to the one taken with Linux, to verify in any corruption occurred when imaging with those Windows tools. I'll post back the results.