Ok, since noone replied, I tried to backup the HD myself this weekend.
Needless to say, DriveImage does not work, so I tried both WinHex and the Xbox HD Driver.
FYI, the PC where I tried to backup the disk has got W2K running with big enough NTFS-Partitions on it (no filesize limit!), so in theory a sector copy should have worked.
However, although I tried both WinHex and the HD Driver about 10 times under various conditions, the Image file always was much to small (between 1.5 and 5 GB), and consequently FATXExplorer could only read the first two or three partitions, which are the Game Cache partitions, unfortunatelly.
As I've got an AMD PC with VIA KT333-Chipset, I thought it could be a bug in the VIA IDE Busmaster drivers, so I reinstalled the original MS ones and even tried to do a backup in Windows Safe Mode, but apart from taking much longer than before, this didn't change anything.
The size of the image produced by WinHex was always the same as the one produced by the HD Driver: With VIA IDE drivers 1.5 GB, with MSs Drivers 4.5 GB and in Safe Mode 5 GB.
Therefore I guess it could be a problem with LBA addressing, could anyone shed any light on that?
I had hoped to get an exact copy of the drive so that it would work with the original BIOS enabled (w/o having acces to the extended partition, of course), but I guess I'll have to simply copy the contents of C and E via FTP, as suggested by the EvoX authors.
However, on my Xbox' original HD the two Hex values at 0x8ca80000 and 0xabe80000 seem to be different from the ones given in the EvoX HD upgrade manual:
Both start with 46415458 (which is 'FATX' in ASCII, of course), but the next four bytes are different (unfortunatelly I didn't write them down, I'll check that again tomorrow).
I assume the bytes following FATX are the partition sizes for C and E, but if that's true, shouldn't the two Hex strings exactly match the ones on the original drive?
Please note that the drive in my Xbox is a 10 GB Seagate disc, so maybe the values in the manual are from the 8 GB WD one.
This could be of interest for the EvoX developers as well, so it would be nice if anyone knew the answer.
Cheers,
JD
