Hi all,
A little explanation
..
This xboxdumper tool's origins are quite old it appears, and has its origins with XBOX1 and the xbox-linux crew.
This is speculation
In the early days of XBOX1, it appears that someone figured out that booting the XBOX1 unlocked its HDD, and you could then hotswap the HDD with a PC, and access it. But at that time people didnt know the format of the HDD. So they used PC HDD imaging tools (tools that simply dump all the HDD sectors to a file) to rip the contents. What you then end up with is a very big datafile that your able to examine with a hex editor. From the analysis, and interpretation of this datafile, the XBOX1s HDD partitions were determined, along with the FATX disk format. The knowledge of the FATX disk format was implemented in a utility named xboxdumper, which provided a useful way to list and extract specific files from the datafile.
Fast forward to XBOX360. Because the XBOX360 HDD can be purchased from retail to extend a CORE X360 system after purchase, M$ was unable to lock the HDDs to specific consoles during manufacture (as they had done with the XBOX1). Consequently, X360 HDDs arent locked as such. SATA is a standard interface and SATA PC cards can be purchased. The X360 HDD can be plugged into the PC SATA card and is recognised. But as before with the XBOX1, the format of the X360 HDD was unknown. And, as before, PC HDD image utilities can be used to dump the entire HDD contents into a big datafile. Examination of this datafile revealed that the X360 appeared to still use FATX, but this time the data was in big-endian byte order, to suit the X360s CPU. Thus only a minor change was required to xboxdumper (to make it understand big-endian data), and the same tool can be used to list and extract files from the X360 HDD image.
I obtained an image of my X360s HDD, and stumbled across the Linux source for the big-endian
xboxdumper. I needed a binary of this, and ideally for Windows, since Im not a Linux user.
A utility suite called
Cygwin exists that facilitates the compilation of Linux source code projects into Windows binaries. I simple used this to generate the Windows binary.
I know that may others are also interested learning more about their XBOX 360s, so in order to save others the effort of repeating my steps, the binary has been released. I take no credit for this, I didnt write the source code (the true credits are in the NFO), and I didnt write the Cygwin utility, I simply operated it.
Use it if its useful, ignore it if not.
An update on the release: I now suspect that the version of xboxdumper I found the source for and built may be incomplete in its support for the X360 HDDs. For example, I can find the HexicDeluxe.swf filename in the HDD image datafile, but the utility doesnt list it. Im currently investigating the reasons for this.
This post has been edited by PedrosPad: Jan 6 2006, 10:48 AM
Author
Topic: Xbox(360) Dumper v0.13 (Read 357 times)