Neither xboxhdm 1.9 nor 2.1 worked for me. I'm attempting a soft mod on a virgin xbox. My main desktop is a one year-old quadcore with only one pata connection on the motherboard.
My first step is to backup my eeprom.bin. Using xboxhdm 1.9, I could load the OS from cd via my sata dvd-rw drive or a pata dvd-rw drive with jumper set to slave. Upon attempting to use the ndure script, it would give me the "Linux cd not found!" error. I worked with this for over an hour last night and several hours tonight, including reading previous threads on the error and solutions.
The best solution I've found is to use a computer that has two pata connections on the motherboard. Alas, my previous tower (which has two pata connections on the motherboard...) is dead. The tower before that does not support booting from cd-rom drive, let alone usb drive.
I then attempted to use xboxhdm 2.1. Amazing work, by the way. I'm truly awed at the skill and cooperation that went into this. I got everything working on my sandisk cruzer 2gb flash drive. PC booted perfectly into slax and I could run xboxhd2 via konsole. After loading in qemu, I came to the exact same result upon loading xbrowser (to backup and retrieve my eeprom.bin).
If anything, this has made me more determined to get it working, so I'm off to the store to buy a copy of Splinter Cell tomorrow. I'll splice a USB connection into a breakaway cable to use my memory stick, as buying a new cable is cheaper than buying a used memory card and will provide another route to load data onto my xbox in the future.
I'll post an update on my progress as it occurs.