Alright, so I haven't read the whole thread. But in any case, my brother and I bought Xboxes at around the same time (a couple of year ago), modded them, and have had no problems -- that is until last week, when he was banned from Live. He did not have his chip on (he uses the Xenium ICE chip which he upgraded to about 2-3 months ago). He has never been banned before, etc. etc. Anyway, so I figured with all this talk about a hidden partition, I'll give it a shot, putting my original Xbox HD back into the machine, and logging into Live (haven't played in a month). Everything worked fine -- the Live software was installed to the original HD, and then I had to relaunch to the Live Dashboard, run the Account Recovery wizard to get my account on the original HD, and went ahead and played. I logged on and off mutiple times to make sure everything was kosher.
BTW, the theory about the Live account information being retained on the hidden partition seems to make sense. Before I figured out the "Account Recovery" thing in the Live menu, I figured I'd just boot with a EvoX CD with my original HD in, copy over the all the Live folders from the modded HD, and hopefully that would pull up my account information. Well -- it didn't work, prompting me to use the Account Recover thing. In any case, I thought this might help.
In the meanwhile, a simple fix to the problem to prevent being banned on XBL might be to replace the two device IDE cable in the XBox with a three device cable, add a power splitter with a switch inline, and there you go. I saw a tutorial for something like this already posted on
http://www.llamma.co...a_harddrive.htm. Not the prettiest solution, and not the most elegant, but maybe the safest until someone figures something better out.