Topic: Largest Hard Drive Still 137gb? (Read 2586 times)

Glycerine · « **Reply #30 on:** August 27, 2003, 06:00:00 PM »

wow! Glad to see there are more and more, "don't believe it till i see with my own eyes" types out there. And with the brains to match. Good work!

oz_paulb · « **Reply #31 on:** August 27, 2003, 06:29:00 PM »

QUOTE (heinrich @ Aug 28 2003, 02:05 AM)

I am not sure if you have talked to either xecuter or evox about this incredible hack (or maybe you were with one of them, and doing this on your own) but this is certainly HUGE news, and I would think that they would love to hear about it. You say you have a 'MS Xbox KERNEL' doing this, but can run your own apps and recognizing 8 more partitions? Excuse me for sounding sceptacle, but it is hard to believe that was done in just a few days time, when other teams have been doing bios hacks for quite some time and havent managed this. Hopefully you will share your findings with one of the established bios teams, and we can get this in our xbox's

So far, I'm doing this independently. I'd like for the various 'mod bios' developers to take my changes/incorporate them into their BIOS's, but I figured I'd get it all worked out ahead of time.

Since I'm not sure if/when mod bios developers will incorporate my changes (and whether/not they'll incorporate ALL of my changes - I'm really concerned that the 'partition table' stuff may get ignored since it really only helps other OS's like Linux), I'm also in contact with the developer of Xbtool, and it's possible this will be a selectable option that can be applied as a 'patch' to any bios - just like the various other color/etc patches he's already got.

As far as being sceptical, I understand - there's always someone making great claims that ends up being bogus. But, you can check my history - even though my account on 'xbox-scene.com' is new, I've been hacking the Xbox since about December, 2001. I wrote the 'xbflash' utility, which eventually became the (excellent) 'Xbtool' utility. I know the Xbox KERNEL/security system inside-out (although I'm willing to admit that I don't know it 100%). For an example of my knowledge on the Xbox KERNEL, see the following article that I wrote:

http://xbox-linux.so.....sh structures

(I'm not trying to 'brag' about my abilities - just trying to make the point that I'm not feeding everyone BS - I know how to hack the KERNEL)

As for whether/not my own app can recognize 8 partitions - I haven't tried it (yet), but there's no reason it wouldn't work. There's a single place in the KERNEL where partition #'s are converted to a 'starting LBA sector/# of bytes in partition'. It was hacked in other bios's to allow for the extra 'F:' partition (didn't exist in original Xbox KERNEL). I've just replaced/extended this function to use a table. The size of this table is arbitrary - I suppose I could make '32' partitions if I wanted. There may be other limits in the Xbox KERNEL for 'max # partitions' on a physical media, but I'm not aware if it at the moment.

I've got my copy of the KERNEL working with LBA48 now (in all disk I/O functions (read/write/verify)). As I said in an earlier post, I'm going to write a test app that'll fill the F: drive with a bunch of unique files, then go back and compare them/verify that it's all actually working. I think I'll get that finished tonight - unless I run into problems.

Well, I should get out of here now (back to hacking). I'll update this thread when I've got more news.

- Paulb

Scan-C · « **Reply #32 on:** August 27, 2003, 06:32:00 PM »

QUOTE (heinrich @ Aug 28 2003, 02:05 AM)

I am not sure if you have talked to either xecuter or evox about this incredible hack (or maybe you were with one of them, and doing this on your own) but this is certainly HUGE news, and I would think that they would love to hear about it. You say you have a 'MS Xbox KERNEL' doing this, but can run your own apps and recognizing 8 more partitions? Excuse me for sounding sceptacle, but it is hard to believe that was done in just a few days time, when other teams have been doing bios hacks for quite some time and havent managed this. Hopefully you will share your findings with one of the established bios teams, and we can get this in our xbox's

maybe the teams didn't manage it because they never tried.

i never thought you could get a xbox bios to use lba48 without increasing it's size a few mb which would be to much to cache it into the ram at bootup.games would slow down and so on.because of that i thought no one would ever try it.

great work!keep it up and keep us informed if the drive is 100% accessable or if it overwrites itself after 137 gb.

myst1x · « **Reply #33 on:** August 27, 2003, 06:37:00 PM »

i think this is the most excited i have been in quite awhile

excellent work Paul B....EXCELLENT WORK!!!

heinrich · « **Reply #34 on:** August 27, 2003, 06:43:00 PM »

oz_paulb: thank you for taking the the time to explain a little history, I'm sure you can understand that really all we saw was a 4 day old account, saying that they had done this. Hopefully no offense was taken.

Keep us updated, and I cant wait to get more out of this 160gig drive

nolga · « **Reply #35 on:** August 27, 2003, 06:47:00 PM »

Great discovery paul. 250 gig premods cant wait

Keep us posted this is great news

SigTom · « **Reply #36 on:** August 27, 2003, 07:35:00 PM »

oz_paulb

All i could say when i read it was Holy Shit. This is some great news. I am very impressed that youve got it to do this man. This is a great leap for anyone whose modded thier XBox. Please keep up the good work. May I give you a "Big Up, Much Respect" (shades ala Ali G) and say keep on hacking boy keep on hacking!!!!

Illumina · « **Reply #37 on:** August 27, 2003, 07:03:00 PM »

you're the man oz_paulb

oz_paulb · « **Reply #38 on:** August 27, 2003, 07:39:00 PM »

QUOTE

"Big Up, Much Respect" (shades ala Ali G)

I wish I got Ali G on DirecTV

His show has been on HBO a couple of times (and I thought he was great), but I think it's on "HBO Zone" more often (which isn't on DirecTV).

Oh well...

- Paulb

lowry383 · « **Reply #39 on:** August 27, 2003, 07:03:00 PM »

I'm definetly happy about this news

trevlenOO6 · « **Reply #40 on:** August 27, 2003, 07:26:00 PM »

YAY way to go oz_paulb!

VCD_Junky! · « **Reply #41 on:** August 27, 2003, 08:13:00 PM »

THANKS! I now test

199 games totaling 256gb; 137gb just isn't enough.

This is also perfect for users with an Xbox in their car. Finally they can carry all their games, a chunk of movies, roms, and a hoard of mp3s without HD switching/swapping!

...if this proves to work, the last Xbox storage hurdles would be USB storage and games/apps executed from network drives (I can only dream

)

Heet · « **Reply #42 on:** August 27, 2003, 08:23:00 PM »

Speachless dude. This is an atomic bomb. Doesnt that mean up to 2.2 terabytes? LOL

EvilWays · « **Reply #43 on:** August 27, 2003, 08:16:00 PM »

QUOTE (VCD_Junky! @ Aug 28 2003, 04:37 AM)

the last Xbox storage hurdles would be USB storage and games/apps executed from network drives (I can only dream

)

It'll most likely stay that way since the Xbox only uses USB 1.1.

Large Dopant white · « **Reply #44 on:** August 27, 2003, 08:54:00 PM »

One question just came to mind: you mentioned you made your own partition table, right? I'm under the assumption that you only did it for the space beyond 137GB, but correct me if I'm wrong. Regardless, you think you have a way to change ALL the partition tables (i.e. say I wanted 10GB on E:, 40GB on F:, and 80GB on G:)?
Even without that, you've discovered an awesome hack. Makes me happy I haven't upgraded from my 40GB HDD yet.

Author Topic: Largest Hard Drive Still 137gb? (Read 2586 times)