Print

[walleballr]

OK slap me for having older equiptment but I dont have SATA drives in any of my computers.(My MAC does but that does me no good) I do have USB/SATA capability from a WD My Book that the hard drive died and I kept the case cause I hate to throw things out. Has anyone had luck using a USB SATA controler for this mod? I just ordered the WD1200bev for 49 bucks shipped so I am kinda commited at this point. Thanks in advance

[ZiG]

I just registered here to thank you for posting this tutorial. I just finished the procedure, and aside from a few hiccups that were probably my fault, the process went pretty smoothly and was easy enough to follow. I now have my WD2500BEVS in and working, and in a few weeks when the new 250 gig hdds come out, I'm hoping to reflash it again and make use of the full size of my drive.




Just for reference, the problems I had along the way were:

-Couldn't get my pc to read the drive no matter what I did. Solution: use a different PC
-Had some trouble with the hex editor, editing that one part of the drive. First thing I did wrong was go to sector 400 (decimal) instead of 400 hex. Then I wasn't sure if I should fill in just the first row with those numbers or all the rows. Turns out that just doing the first row worked. After that I wasn't seeing the changes in winhex, but I was running the winhex exe without installing the program. Once I installed the proggy and ran it, I saw the changes.


And an interesting side note: After putting in the new drive, I had to do a system update, as well as update all my games while on XBL. Interesting.

[Yamikotai]

Sorry if this has been asked before, or if this isn't the right place:
Thanks for the tutorial, looks very clear. However, does the drive model have to be 'WD1200BEVS'? I'm in the UK and the only drive I can find is the 'WD1200BEVT'. They seem identical, but would there be any problem if I bought the BEVT model instead of the BEVS model?
Thanks,
Yami
Edit: Ah, had a closer look and the only difference between them is SATAI and SATAII respectively. So the BEVT will probably work. Now to get me a 250GB WD2500BEVT

[danthaman673]

QUOTE(ravihpa @ May 27 2009, 07:24 AM)

Hi guys,

I have a WD 1600BEVT Blue Series HDD, and when I try to flash it with the hddss.bin that I got from *ahem* source, it says...

"LBA size does not match"

Can you guys please help me out with this. I am using Hddhackr 1.00, and it does detect the BEVT, and then I select "Flash" and it asks me for the hddss.bin and then shows information of the BEVT drive and the info in the hddss.bin, which is a 120 gb Fujitsu hddss.

Then it says something like info does not match in Sector 16, do you want to Flash ? I click Yes, and then it shows that message "LBA size does not match"

Any help in this regards will be greatly appreciated. Thanx a lot in advance.

PS:  I also tried hddhackr 0.91, and it doesn't even detect my WD drive

It says, "No drives detected in Enhanced mode, Now searching in Legacy Mode" and then shows me something like....put nr number from 1 to 4 (x for exit) or something like that. Tried pressing from 1 to 4, but nothing happens, and then ultimately had to press x to exit.

Guys, please help me out

Anyone else having this problem, it can be solved without drastic harware etc.. changes. Just use the latest version of HDDhackr v1.22 Changelog indicates it's been upgraded to cope with '09 scorpios


Can anyone tell me if there is a way I can change my hacked 120gb drive (hddss.bin from torrent) to identify as my orginal legit 20gb (I've heard they're busting/banning ppl with modded drives) I've looked at earlier tuts in this forum but they're a bit confusing to say they least eg flash drive (unspecified) with hddss.bin (which one???) and then undo (why flash to undo immediately??) etc..

Please Help I don't wan't my hard earned to go down the tubes as I'm too poor :-)

[danthaman673]

QUOTE(Pishposh @ Jan 8 2009, 06:41 AM)

1.  Copy HDDHackr.com and the hddss.bin file to your bootable floppy disk.

2.  Turn off your PC, connect the WD BEVS drive, and boot the PC up on the floppy (I also disconnected my PC's hard drive just to be safe.)

3.  At the command prompt type "hddhackr -f" and hit enter. Follow through the prompts and be sure to create an undo file when asked.  If for some reason you cannot flash due to an error saying that 'sectors 16-22 do not match make sure you have a BEVS drive'  You need to hook this drive to another SATA controller and try to flash.  I went through 3 different computers before one finally worked for me.

4.  When it's finished, reboot on the floppy again. Run "hddhackr -f" again and it will tell you if the drive will be compatible with your 360 or not.

5.  Turn off your PC, disconnect the WD BEVS, and disconnect your 20GB drive from your 360. Disassemble the casing, and remove the 20GB drive. Hook the WB BEVS up to the connector and plug it into the 360. You're going to have to unhook the drive and pull it out again so I'd recommend not completely reassembling the casing... I just put one screw in to hold the drive in.

6.  Turn on your 360, goto the system blade, "console settings", and "system info." Jot down the serial number, you'll need it in the next step.

7.  Go back to the system blade, goto "memory" and you should have the option to format the drive. It will ask for the serial number, type it in and send it flying. (if it says "no device detected" something is wrong. Check the connections.)

8.  While it's formatting go ahead and hook the 20GB hard drive up to your PC. Boot up into Windows, create a folder on your desktop called "xbox" and run Xplorer360Extreme

9.  Within Xplorer360Extreme click "Drive" then "Open" then "Hard Drive or Mem Card". It should take a few seconds and then pop up some partitions in the left hand window. (If it doesn't detect the drive, check the connections and also make sure that your SATA controller driver is properly installed.)  You can also do this with the MS XBOX data transfer cable.

10.  Click on Partition 03, select all the items in the right hand window, and drag and drop them to the folder you created on your desktop. If you get errors you'll have to open task manager (ctrl-alt-del) and manually kill the program... reopen the program and drag and drop the folders one at a time. When you find the problem folder create a subfolder in the xbox folder on your desktop with the same name as the problem folder, go into the problem folder and copy the folders/files in there one at a time. You may have to do this a few times, creating folders within folders. For me the problem file was a 0kb .db file within the compatibility folder under a few subfolders. I couldn't get the file to copy so I just created a blank text file and renamed it to the exact name of the file (it was st.db or something like that.) Once the copy starts going it will probably take awhile, depending on how much data you have... so take a break.

Do not try to drag and drop or extract the 'cache' folder from part 3.  You will go into a endless copy loop.  Instead, as mentioned above copy all the files out the cache folder in small batches until complete.  The only other folder I found that you have to do this to is the 'Compatibility' folder on Part 3.

11.  Within Xplorer360Extreme choose the "backup partition 2" option to dump the second partition to a bin file (named part2.bin or something like that.) It should create a 262MB file.  Then create a 20gb hdds.bin file from your original disk.

12.  Shutdown the PC and disconnect the 20GB drive. By this time the 360 should be done formatting the drive, so turn it off and disconnect the 120GB drive. Hook it up to the PC and boot up to Windows.  When you conntect this drive to the PC you will only see partition 2.  To get all your partitions back, restore your 20gb hdds.bin file to your 120gb drive.  Take this 120gb drive and boot into hddhackr again, Undo the flash, reboot, and then run hddhackr to re-flash your drive with the hddss.bin. Don't make another undo.bin, but after this final flash, the drive will be recognized in your 360 with all partitions there.  Format this drive in your XBOX again and you will see all 3 partitions. (Thanks thr4773r)

13. Connect the 120gb back to the PC and within Xplorer360Extreme click "Drive" then "Open" then "Hard Drive or Mem Card".   You should see all three partitions there.

14. Expand Partition 03 and copy all of the data from the xbox folder you created on your desktop. This will take awhile depending on how much data you have, so take another break.

15. After partition 3 is complete, select "restore partition 2", select the 262mb bin file you made in step 11 (part2.bin.) Once it completes, your drive is ready!

16.  You should now be able to put the 120gb back in your XBOX with almost all of your data and settings.  The caveat to this is that some game saves will either be missing or corrupted.  Some notable ones posted on the boards are 'Rock Band', and Fable II.  I can tell  you that I backed up my Fable II save to a MU and after I upgraded the drive it could not find my save on the HD but it started my save of the MU beautifully.  So my advice you is to try to save your most important gave saves to a MU(if you have one) or invest in a MS data tranfer cable as I don't think you'll see those issues if you do.  If im wrong someone correct me please.

XBOX transfer cable instructions can be found here.  I'm almost positive someone has successfully used the cable connected to a PC on the thread also.

O.K questions:
Step 1: Which hddss.bin? I asume you mean one ripped from a 120gb
Steps 2-10: I'm using HDDhackr 1.22 so it makes tall the partitions for me. I'm also using XPORT 2.08 instead of xplorer as it can copy the cache w/o crashing and seems more stable over-all
Step 11:The bit that says then create hddss.bin from 20gb do you mean in xplorer or in dos??
Step 12: this step has a lot going on and is VERY confusing. When ity says undo flash which flash are you undoing? with what? and if possible ... why? When you 're-flash' is that with the 120gb hddss.bin??

 Is this method safe to use on live (assuming you DL'ed you hddss.bin from a torrent) if not is there a way to re-sign my 20gb hddss.bin with oh let us say... sigggyyyy or something similar so live sees 20gb drive even though you have 120gb??

Thanks adn ANY help would be appreciated

[ssidewinder]

Many steps on this tutorial are obsolete and are no longer necessary and makes the upgrade process seem more complex then it really is.    

Here's a simpler tutorial.

tutorial

I think this thread has served its useful purpose and should either be updated or closed.

[Constellation]

One question. I previously flashed a 250GB WD hard drive with the 120 GB hdss.bin. This was before the 250GB hdss.bin came out. Now, I want to upgrade to the full 250 gigs. Can I just re-flash with the 250GB hdss.bin using hddhackr? Or would I need to use undo.bin first, restore the original the Western Digital firmware, THEN reflash to the 250 GB hdss.bin?