pb_05 think of it as futureproofing... maybe one day Gary-OPA may support all the media stealth features. Plus, with most of the latest utilities they do the stealth automatically so one would have to go out of their way to make a non-stealth backup!
trigger,
If you are real curious want to manually look/verify at those sectors on backup, load up isobuster and look at following sectors...
PFI = 129821
DMI = 129822
SS = 129823
Compare them with the individual bins.
FYI, those are last 3 sectors of the Video partition, where xtreme style firmwares re-direct the original requests to. If you wanna understand more... a sector is 2048 bytes. Since sectors start at zero we will count like 0-129822 instead of 1-129823. Now go look at the video360.iso in xtreme and notice it is 265,873,408 bytes long, divide by 2048 and you get a length of 128921 sectors (or sectors 0-128920). After that there is PFI, DMI and SS at sectors 128921, 2 and 3 respectively. You will notice the build360.bat does a binary copy of all these files and ends up with the desired results - pretty simple really. I realize you are using XBox Backup Creator but sometimes it is interesting to know how it works instead of just clicking a button.
Consider the PFI and DMI as copies of the original and they are put in an unused spot on the backup. When a request for this PFI or DMI data is made from the Xbox 360, the hacked firmware intercepts this, looks up the original info at these sectors and returns the data (making it look like a normal disc... hopefully). If these PFI or DMI sectors are not there (all 00's instead), the firmware has embedded PFI and will return the real DMI from the backup (possibly flagging it as a copy).
Maybe if C4E is reading this, could update future version to make it return a read-error or something to the console if these sectors are requested from non-stealth backup - this way if MS does implement media DMI check later on, accidentally putting in a non-stealth backup will cause a disc read error and not much evidence for MS to ban because how could they presume the disc wasn't damaged?
This post has been edited by IntestineMan: Dec 12 2006, 08:51 AM