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[adeingolf]

Just thought id share this with you guys as I cant believe it worked!

A friend brought round his xbox that "the kids" had buggered by selecting live, resulting in it continually fragging.  After a few unsuccessful attempts at hotswapping with my xbox we gave up and had a few beers!

I then thought "sod it" ill try something as we had nothing to lose.  I ftp'd into my xbox and then moved my IDE cable on to the buggered hd (it was still powered by his xbox) and tried refreshing flashfxp.  After a couple of attempts (It has always been a bit flakey when it would actually connect!) it showed the drives from the fragged xbox!  

At first I thought it might be still the good hd that was showing, so I copied the Linux_backup folder to pc and compared the hd key with the good drive and it was different!  So then I took the eeprom.bin from this buggered hd and used it to produce an xbhdm disc and rebuilt the drive.

Lo and behold it worked and we now have a rescued hd!

This would seem a much easier and safer way to rebuild a fragged xbox hd if like my friend, no backup eeprom etc was available.

Your thoughts would be appreciated.

[Chicken Scratch Boy]

i love the awesome "ghetto" approach

(ghetto meaning unconventional and shoe string)

[adeingolf]

Lol, well I tried the conventional - hotswapping but couldnt get the bloody thing to work (or remember exactly how I did it before!)  And after a few beers, this seemed worth a try.  Just glad it did and potentialy for me anyway, found a way that is easy for my needs.

[Chicken Scratch Boy]

QUOTE (adeingolf @ Sep 26 2004, 05:45 PM)

... after a few beers, this seemed worth a try.

heh thats what a few beers can do for you

glad it worked out for ya.

[triggernum5]

Were the 2 hdds identical models?

[adeingolf]

No they were not.  Mine was a 160gb Maxtor and the other was a 10gb seagate.

[total_ass]

wait let me understand this. you ftped into the good xbox, then plugged in the bad xboxes hard drive to the good one mid-ftp?

[adeingolf]

Yes total_ass - exactly that!

[total_ass]

technically that's hotswapping isn't it? i mean couldn't the same method be used to access the bad hard drive with an app on the good ones xbox. i don't like the idea of hotswapping...............

[Scaramanga]

Hold on, does this also mean I can just ftp the exploits (like ude2) to an unmodded xbox
instead of making a boot disc & mess around with my PC ide cables and bios?

[adeingolf]

Well maybe so but the point is, that I didnt have to worry about getting the timing right/risk damaging the hd pins by swapping at a certain time.  It was simply a case of launching ftp and then swap the cable over from the good hd to the bad one.

[total_ass]

that's good, so you can do it anytime? do you keep the power plugged into the original xbox then and just swap over the IDE cable? this is way better than hotswapping, it also makes it easier to install softmods for people who don't want to hotswap with the pc. does this always work or was it just a one-off?

[adeingolf]

Yep - as you said, power to second hd then swap ide cable from good to bad drive and retain full ftp functions.

I havnt tried it again since but dont see why it wouldnt work on any combination of hard drives, as when I did it, I had a fully modded and working 160gb and swapped to a stock 10gb seagate that was fragging.

Thinking about it now, I could probably just have removed/updated the offending dash files that was causing the fragging of the hd, without the need for rebuilding it using xbhdm but at least we got it to work!

Scaramanga - I guess in theory you should be able to, im really not too hot on the ins and outs of how the exploits work - just very grateful to ldots and the like, for sharing them with us!  The fragging drive in question had already been modded with UDE and so backup files/eeprom created.

[triggernum5]

I had tried that before without any luck..  The only actual way I could init an hdd from an already booted program was in Config Magic I was able to read the new hdd's details onto the screen..  I imagine you could use this method to lock a hdd.  When I tried to switch between the 2 stock seagate hdds found in xboxes during an ftp session I was unable to bring up any directory listings from the new hdd at all..  The hdd seemed unresponsive, and was making funny noises so I gave up..  Hopefully we can get some confirmation on this from other ppl..

[adeingolf]

0123456 - Im not entirely sure exactly what happened - the guy said his kids were playing with a game and looking at live as a way of getting online - not realising he used sys link via kai etc.

Also, it apparently booted origional games afterwards and that was the reason I told him to bring it round as I would salvage it from Mechassualt mem card exploit.  However, when it got to mine it wouldnt boot anything and the rest as they say......

I remember my brother had a similar thing happen to him.  When his was connected to his works network, he selected live from the dashboard - resulting in errors and only able to boot origionals.  Then when I got to it, same thing - wouldnt boot anything so we had to use backup files and rebuild.

Anyone know if this is similar to the clock loop problem, as both had power disconnected for some time, between them booting origionals and then not booting anything?

triggernum5 - thats exactly what im after, anyone elses experience/success at trying this.  I only did it the once with that setup and was fortunate that it worked.  Dont see why it wouldnt with other hd's though.