Print

[PedrosPad]

I think I've just about read though this entire forum, and while some people have obviously succeeded, I'm none the wiser on exactly how people hooked up their X360 HDDs to their PCs.

I understand that the X360 HDD in a 20GB Laptop-style 2.5" hard drive with a SATA interface.

I guess if you had a desktop/tower PC, you could fit a SATA HDD controller ISA card.  Not so straightforward when you only have laptop  .  My idea to plug it into my laptop, was to use an external USB HDD enclosure (that takes SATA drives).  (Yes, these are designed to take 3.5" HDDs.  I'm unsure if a 2.5" one has the same connections ).  Anyone had any success plugging one into a laptop?  If so how?

[PedrosPad]

I've never seen a 2.5" SATA drive 'in the flesh' (and the photos on free60 didn't help ).  Does it have a IDE-style ribbon cable edge connector?  I've a PCMCIA SATA card, but it has eSATA sockets (external SATA, very much like USB-style sockets).  Will an eSATA cable plug directly into the raw X360 HDD?

[wolrahnaes]

eSATA will not plug directly into a SATA hard drive as far as I know.  It's changed just enough to prevent regular SATA cables from being used, so I'd assume it won't just plug straight in to a regular SATA part.

Have you ever seen a regular SATA drive?  The connectors are identical, and even placed the same, just the drive itself is smaller.

Your best bet for using it with a laptop is a USB > SATA converter, though I'm not sure how hard those are to find.

[PedrosPad]

QUOTE(oz_paulb @ Jan 19 2006, 04:00 PM)

It looks like this would work:

  USB to SATA adapter (with power)

Wow.  That looks positively sexy.    I’ll purchase, play, and report back.  

[PedrosPad]

Looks like they don't ship the sexy USB to SATA adapter outside the US .  (yes, other retailers exist, but not found one that states that the PSU will work with Europe's 240V!   Found this alternative (which says it does work with 2.5" drives and 240V!), but it's no where near as sexy)

But for the interim, my £1.99 USB 2.0 External Case for 3.5" SATA/IDE Hard Drive arrived last night.  It comes with a myriad of cables, so I’m hopeful one will allow connection to the X360’s 2.5” HDD.   (An external USB connection may prove a more maintainable solution for more than just laptop owners!  I’ll post back results.)

I plan on using the anandtech tutorial on Disassembling the Xbox 360 HDD unit, and hope to attempt the wire up shortly.  Let me know if there is anything additional I should watch out for.  

[PedrosPad]

QUOTE(oz_paulb @ Jan 24 2006, 05:05 PM)

As for things to watch out for: when the first 'dump' of an HDD was done (at least the first I heard of), there seemed to be some corruption at the start of the drive.  After analysis, it was decided that Windows had corrupted the drive when it was first inserted into/recognized by the Windows PC.  (Windows had automatically written some volume/partition info to the start of the drive - since it couldn't find a 'standard' partition table there already, it thought the drive was 'empty').

I don't know 100% that this is true, but it's something to watch out for.

I've placed an order for the 'sexy' adapter you weren't able to get.  I plan on booting from a Linux 'live' CD (Knoppix, or similar) before I connect the drive to my laptop.  I don't know much about these 'live' Linux CDs - they may not work on laptops too well/may not have the drivers to let me access the USB->SATA adapter.  But, it seems safer to try this first.

Ooohh - good heads up.

Similar to yourself, I planned to use g4u - a lightweight live Linux CD/boot floppy set that claims to rip HDDs to a connected FTP server, but following your heads up, I'll be doubly sure to disconnect the drive before entering Windows.

[PedrosPad]

QUOTE(oz_paulb @ Jan 24 2006, 07:05 PM)

I hadn't heard of 'g4u'.  Thanks for letting me know about it - I'll give it a try.

Hmmmm .  'g4u' says it support SATA disks - which was encouraging, but it doesn't list USB  .

QUOTE

The system running g4u itself can have IDE, SATA, SCSI or RAID disks with various controllers (Adaptec, ...) as well as wide range of PCMCIA, Cardbus, ISA and PCI network cards.

I just downloaded it, booted, and tried to see my external USB NTFS formatted HDD with no joy.  The source does say it supports USB keyboards, and network cards - so it could that that I'm just unlucky with my laptop's USB controller.

[deadparrot]

Pedro, give Knoppix a shot.  It may be quite a bit bigger (~700MB) it's a full distro in a live CD.  KDE and everything included.  I think you'd have better luck using your setup with a more full distro.  It should have support for all sorts of external drives.  And if you decide to save anything, it'll just put it inside a SWAP file on your HD, leaving everything else intact.

Just my opinion though.  Good luck with this.

[PedrosPad]

QUOTE(serantes @ Jan 25 2006, 05:53 PM)

Lo
pedro i have 2 xbox hdds both samsung and i pluged both hdds with a pci sata card from conceptronics to my computer, the drive don´t get recognized in windows but you cna dump it with winhex , it works really fine, u don´t have to do other thing that plug the drive and run winhex, and i have dumped my hds a lot of times and i never get corruption on any these discs so this stuff about drive get corrupted its an urban legend, one mroe thing i tried to extract the demos that i have at my hdd with your pirs.exe tool and some can´t be extracted cause largue filenames , could you fix this problem please ?

Hi serantes,

I got your PM re: flaws in PIRS.  I hoping that accessing my X360 HDD from my PC will provide me with some PIRS examples with which to fix the issue.  

When you say "i have dumped my hds a lot of times and i never get corruption on any these discs", have you ever successfully written any of the dumps back to the HDD and had it boot  on the X360?  This would appear to be the acid test proving that no corruption occurred during the transfer.  My requirement is to be able to do this (after having added files to the HDD image using VMWare running Xebian, and mounting/dismounting the X360 HDD dump image as a loopback file system ).

[serantes]

Hello again predo
no i just dumped the hdd i havent added the files caused i don´t know how to patch linux´s kernel for add xtaf compatibility and mount the hdd, i think there is no way to add files in windows atm except using vmware as far as i know, im waiting for angelwound´s tool for do it in windows, what i done is write dumps from other memory cards in mine, and even with different size winhex gives me an error but the dump works in the console, so i can assure u that there is no crc check at memory cards, dunno about hdss
if i can help u on anything just ask it , i would also like to be able to patch the linux kernel , maybe some1 can make a guide or even share a vmware image :PPPP

[PedrosPad]

QUOTE(serantes @ Jan 26 2006, 02:25 PM)

i would also like to be able to patch the linux kernel , maybe some1 can make a guide or even share a vmware image :PPPP

If I understand correctly, the big-endian FATX source is intended for Xebian (it's in the same CVS).  Xebian is open source, and works on PCs as well as XBOXs.  And it's not illegal to distribute VMWare images - heck, even VMWare now has a free VMWare player  .  If/when I get it all working, I'll make the image available.

[serantes]

lo again pedro , after i saw your post i done a google search on xebin and i noticed the latest vesion is from august of 2005 so i think big endian fatx aka xtaf is not supported, correct me if im wrong (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) im really interested on get the xtaf working cause i want write one of my xbox360 hdds so please keep me informed about your progress (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

[PedrosPad]

QUOTE(serantes @ Jan 26 2006, 05:16 PM)

lo again pedro , after i saw your post i done a google search on xebin and i noticed the latest vesion is from august of 2005 so i think big endian fatx aka xtaf is not supported, correct me if im wrong im really interested on get the xtaf working cause i want write one of my xbox360 hdds so please keep me informed about your progress

Nah! - Big-endian FATX support isn't in the Xebian distribution.  I understand you have build your own kernel from the latest CVS to install it.  But I believe Xebian is self-hosting, so I'm hoping to use it to rebuild a newer version of itself.  

[PedrosPad]

QUOTE(PedrosPad @ Jan 24 2006, 11:52 AM)

But for the interim, my £1.99 USB 2.0 External Case for 3.5" SATA/IDE Hard Drive arrived last night.  It comes with a myriad of cables, so I’m hopeful one will allow connection to the X360’s 2.5” HDD.   (An external USB connection may prove a more maintainable solution for more than just laptop owners!  I’ll post back results.)

I plan on using the anandtech tutorial on Disassembling the Xbox 360 HDD unit, and hope to attempt the wire up shortly.

Update:
Got this all working over the weekend.  

I used the anandtech tutorial on Disassembling the Xbox 360 HDD unit and it was very clear.  I couldn’t find a Torx T12 anywere – online or off  .  So I purchased this 8pc Folding Tamper Proof Star Key Wrench for the needed T6 & T7, and found that the included T10 worked fine in place of the elusive T12 (it was needed to unscrew the 4 black screws holding the shielding to the drive).

Connected the X360 HDD into my USB 2.0 External Case for 3.5" SATA/IDE Hard Drive and booted g4u – Ghost 4 Unix.  Contrary to my finding posted previously, this time it did find all my USB connected drives, including the X360 HDD with the alien disk format.  However, g4u is intended to use an FTP connection to save the image of a hard drive, and I recall reading that imaging the 20GB X360 HDD disk-to-disk takes around 40 minutes with the Linux ‘dd’ command   .  The time it was going to take to FTP the image, especially over my laptops 802.11g Wifi, filled me with dread.  

I recalled that the native hard disk format of my Linksys NSLU2 NAS unit is the Linux ext3 format.  I dragged one of its USB connected ext3 formatted drives downstairs to the laptop, and plugged it in next to where the X360 HDD was connected.  I still hoped to use the g4u boot CD, but directly use the Linux ‘dd’ command.  No joy.  I expect the g4u distribution contains the ‘dd’ command, but I couldn’t find it or launch it.  .

Next, following a suggestion further up this thread, I tried booted the Linux!Live KNOPPIX CD.  This too found all the connected USB drives , and being a full Linux distribution, I had no trouble launching the ‘dd’ command.  I opened a terminal window from nice KNOPPIX GUI desktop, and used the following command sequence to image the USB connected X360 HDD (ubb1) to the USB connected ext3 formatted HDD (ubb2).

CODE

su –
mount –o remount,rw /mnt/ubb2a
dd if=/dev/ubb1 of=/mnt/ubb2a/Temp/X360HDD.img

(The middle ‘remount’ command was necessary as the Live KNOPPIX CD mounts all volumes as read-only by default! – increasing my confidence that the X360 HDD wouldn’t get corrupted.)

After disconnecting the X360 HDD, I rebooted into Windows XP – with the Linux ext3 disk still connected.  I used the very good ext2ifs utility to access Linux drive from Windows and dragged the 20GB X360HDD.img file onto my NTFS drive for examination.  I've run the released X360HDD image tools on the image, and it seems to read fine, and I successfully extracted a couple of the files.

I've yet to connect the X360 HDD back to the X360.  Before I do so, and now that I've taken a safe image of the X360 HDD, I plan to attempt to short cut the process using HexWorkshop or WinHex to image the HDD.  I'll diff the resultant image to the one taken with Linux, to verify in any corruption occurred when imaging with those Windows tools.  I'll post back the results.

[PedrosPad]

QUOTE(PedrosPad @ Jan 30 2006, 07:49 PM)

I've yet to connect the X360 HDD back to the X360.  Before I do so, and now that I've taken a safe image of the X360 HDD, I plan to attempt to short cut the process using HexWorkshop or WinHex to image the HDD.  I'll diff the resultant image to the one taken with Linux, to verify in any corruption occurred when imaging with those Windows tools.  I'll post back the results.

Ok, tonight I re-imaged the X360 HDD using HexWorkshops 'Disk->Save Sectors...' command.  I file compared it to the image taken with Linux's 'dd' command and there were no differences.  I'm now confortable that HexWorkshop doesn't alter the disk on read.  Additional info - the Linux 'dd' command took 52 minutes to image the 20GB X360 HDD using my hardware, HexWorkshop only took 20mins.

It could be that the Windows OS still 'labels' the disk when it's accessed for writing.   To check this I'll use HexWorkstop to write the image back to the X360 HDD, and then reread it and diff again with the Linux HDD dump.  Results to follow.