ugh, now this is embarrassing..
i was able to get those gamesaves copied over, and did the softmod properly. i was in the evox dash, was able to restart the system, load a backup, etc. i then decided to boot into my auto-installer deluxe 4.10 (which i was able to do on my chipped xbox) so that i could install the xbox media center dash, emulators, etc.
i first backed up my eeprom and c drive, but then stupidly i went to the "format" section and wiped out my C and E partitions (since i figured the one-click softmod would reinstall all of that). so, i went to do the softmod one click, and got an error that it couldn't move/copy a file, i don't remember the exact error. so, i did the manual "install dash" option, then "install emulators" section. all seemed to go well as i got confirmation messages, but when i rebooted, i hit a "contact customer service" error, i believe error 13.
i found instructions on how to perform the hot swap and successfully, got the hard drive hooked up to my pc unlocked, loaded up the xboxmaker application, and got the "all OK, all done" message after both C and E partitions were set back. however, i had already shut the xbox off before connecting back to it, and then shutting down the xbox to re-lock the drive. when i went to restart the xbox, the xbox logo appears and the white microsoft logo, but goes into an endless reboot loop. i am however able to load original xbox discs.
thinking maybe i screwed up by not connecting the xbox drive back to the xbox before shutting it off, i performed the hot swap again with the xboxmaker, got the "all OK, all done" confirmations, and this time i did properly hook the xbox drive back to the xbox before powering down the console (at which time the game i was booting up resumed). i figured that would have helped, but it's still in and endless reboot loop

disregard, i sold the system with the issue.
i'm still curious as to why this would happen, as i thought the xboxhdmaker program installs the dash properly.