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[Jonlee]

Hey everyone, I am trying to unlock an old xbox hard drive and I burned a XBOXHDM key with the eeprom on it. I hooked my old hard drive up to primary and the cd drive to secondary and it boots from the cd and goes into the XBOXHDM program but when I go to actually unlock it, it says it can't find the linux cd. Any ideas on what could be causing this or how to fix it?

Thanks for your time!

[obcd]

Hi,

this issue came up in this forum already. Apparantly in the other case, the harddisk was connected as master and the cdrom as slave on the same ide cable. Are you sure that your cdrom is connected to a different ide port on your motherboard? (A flatcable going from your computerboard to your cdrom, and nothing else ... and another flatcable going from the harddisk to your computerboard ...)

If everything is connected fine, and xboxhdm is unable to unlock your harddisk, than you might try the dostools.

Connect the harddisk as a slave disk to your pc. Start your windows OS and use the liveinfo program. Load the eeprom.bin file of your xbox. In the bottom fields, select the xbox harddisk. The program will give you the xbox password for that drive.

Shutdown the pc. Connect the xbox harddisk as master drive on the primary ide controller. Boot your pc from a dos bootable floppy and use the dos tools to unlock the harddisk. Just be very carefully with the lock program to make sure you don't accidently lock your harddisk with a password you can't remember afterwards.

regards.

[Jonlee]

Ok, well I have them both on one IDE cable because I only have one IDE port on my motherboard and my CD drive doesn't have an SATA port to hook it up. I will try doing it the dostools way and let you know if that worked.
Thanks for your time!

[Jonlee]

Well I tried that and it couldn't find the hard drive for some reason or the password. I don't know if the hard drive is totally ruined then. I'm just going to stop trying. Thanks for your help though.

[obcd]

Hi,

could you be a bit more specific? What program couldn't find the harddisk? Is it the liveinfo program or the dostools? The reason I am asking is because this information could be usefull for other people.
As modern pc motherboards seem to have only one ide port left for the dvd or cdrom unit, other people will run into the same problems as you do. Maybe the ide port of your motherboard is set as secundary ide port instead of primary. In that case, the dostools won't work. It is possible that your pc has a bios setup item to select the ide port as being primary or secundary.

If you connect your harddisk to your xbox, and it comes up with a error screen giving you error 5, than nothing is wrong with your harddisk. It simply isn't locked yet.

Modern motherboards usually have a option to boot from a usb stick. This could be a method to run the xboxhdm program without cdrom connected. The tools to make a usbstick bootable can be found on the internet. I think that a old pc to experiment with (one with 2 ide controllers) is the easiest solution in your case.

regards.

[Jonlee]

Liveinfo couldn't find it but I already have the eeprom and hd key. Dos tools gave me an error that it couldn't find the password when I did unlockhd. I tried doing hdunlock and it came up with a list of 4 slots and each said device not ready, or something like that, so I couldn't do it that way.

I think might have something to do with my bios. When it boots it finds my xbox hard drive and cdrom on the ide, and I can find it under boot order for hard drives, but in my IDE settings it never finds it. I'm not exactly sure what is going on.

Is there any other ways to unlock the HDD if I have all the backup information (eeprom, hdinfo, etc.)? It's an error code 6 so I guess the hard drives are still good.

Thanks

[obcd]

Hi,

error 6 usually means that the harddisk is locked with the wrong code so that the xbox can't unlock it. If the disk comes out of another xbox, this is as expected.
Liveinfo can give you the unlock key if you have the eeprom.bin of the xbox the disk was originally in.  

The best way to select your harddisk in liveinfo is: place the cursor in the IDE device window and click in it. Press the enter button and use the up down arrow keys to choose the disk. In my case, clicking on the down arrow didn't work to select my xbox harddisk.

If your pc isn't helpful, than another possibility is with your xbox. The easiest way is with a modchip. You can load a dashboard or a tool from the dvd drive that can unlock the xbox harddisk. If your harddisk is not your xbox original one, you will need to alter the eeprom hddkey to the one of the xbox the disk came from.

I really think another (old) pc with 2 ide ports is a easier solution. Your local computer store could be helpfull. Maybe you could try things out over there, so that you at least know if your computer is causing the problems.

Sorry I can't be of any more help.

regards.