Hey -
I've got some great news - I have the MS Xbox KERNEL reading/writing an LBA48 drive using the LBA48 commands (meaning: drives > 137GB will be possible)!
The KERNEL recognizes that it's an LBA48 drive at startup time, and sets the drive size accordingly (I'm using a 200GB drive, and it's reading the size correctly).
The KERNEL read/write functions are now using LBA48 commands, and they work!
Now, I've not tried reading/writing past the LBA28 limit on the disk, but there's no reason it won't work - the only possible issue was whether/not the LBA48 commands/command-structure would work.
I've got to clean up the error checking, and finalize a couple more routines. Then, I'll write a test app that creates a bunch of unique files on the F: partition, and goes back/verifies they all are still unique (to confirm nothing 'wraps' and overwrites back to the beginning).
I've also got a simple 'partition table' mechanism, so there can be up to 8 partitions on the drive. The main reason for this is to allow for other operating systems (like Linux) to co-exist with the Xbox (usually, the Xbox uses up the entire remainder of the drive for F:, leaving nothing for Linux).
I hope to have this all finished up in the next couple of days (depends on my 'real' job, and how busy I am there). I just wanted to give an update, since I think people are interested in this.
I'll update this thread when I've got more news.
- Paulb