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[Fade Iczer GEast]

Well... Not really sure where to begin, but like many of you here when I get bored I do random... "stuff" to my xbox. I play with new apps, useless apps, fiddle with the Bios and just for fun I occasionally manage to wipe my improperly formatted F drive (accidentally) (IMG:style_emoticons/default/sad.gif).
In a nutshell, here's what happened:
Extended partition on a my 500gb HDD was way big and improperly formatted. I had no G Drive. As anyone would expect, data corruption occurred (sorry, I was just too lazy to double check the first time around). Without thinking, I
1) opened up X3 Live config
2) changed settings to LBA487 mode
3) Formatted.

Then I remembered that I had somewhere around 90 backups and tons of TV shows on the box. Not wanting to spend the better part of a week unshelving discs and begging them to run on my long broken DVD drive, I frantically searched the forums for an HDD recovery solution that I knew didn't exist. And I was right, there was no solution. I found a few posts referencing WinHex to back up HDD images, some other software that supposedly works (Yet doesn't read Fatx. and hence didn't work either) and numerous posts that more or less explain that HDD recovery is synonymous with piracy (Burn in hell, I have receipts (IMG:style_emoticons/default/tongue.gif) ). WTF?!!

At last I had given up, and figured I might as well rescue the few apps and saves I had on the E partition, but not wanting to risk running it on the xbox I grabbed a copy of Xplorer360 9 Beta and searched away. No success. It didn't even read the disk. I would up having to search my box for ver. 5, which did read the drive. And here's where I get to my point:
All my drives popped up. All of them. Way at the bottom of the list, a miracle had happened; my now formatted F partition showed up, with all my backups, apps, TV shows along with various builds of Xport yumminess. Shocked, I plugged the drive back into the Xbox, which now displayed an F: drive with 137 GB free and a G: drive with a few hundred GB free as well. Nothing else. Curious to see if the files worked again, I slapped it back in the PC.

Movies played, backups worked and everything seemed good. If anyone decides to accidentally a whole xbox like I did, see if you can read your files with Xplorer360. I liked it ok before, bugs aside, but now I can't imagine using anything else.

Edit: I suppose it's important to note that I did not attempt to write to the partition after formatting it, which may explain at least partially why my files were still there.

This post has been edited by Fade Iczer GEast: Apr 20 2009, 01:48 AM

[Bomb Bloke]

Hey, that's pretty cool. Well spotted. Must be a bug where Xplorer360 is reading the drive incorrectly, but it's certainly not one to complain about.

So to be clear, it's Xplorer360 v5 you used for this?

(On a side note, PhotoRec is a HDD recovery program which does specifically support FATX - But you can't really beat having it all listed there neatly the way you got it).

Anyway, once you've got all the files properly salvaged, remember the partition needs to be formatted with XBPartitioner (as opposed to... anything else) in order to avoid future corruption.

Use the EvoX dashboard to confirm the cluster size by adding a 1kb file to a partition and noting the change in free space. That difference tells you your cluster size. This figure should be 32,768 bytes (32kb) for partitions larger then 256gb, or 65,536 bytes (64kb) for partitions larger then 512gb.

(EvoX is about the only dashboard that lists free space in bytes).

[Fade Iczer GEast]

Yeah, that's v5. I tested the latest v9 beta and it didn't even recognize the drive. Oh, and yeah, I repartitioned it with XBPartitioner. Truth is bro, I was just to lazy to bother in the first place, and that's where the data corruption came from in the first place. Thanks for the tips too (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif). Oh! I wasn't sure if maybe the Xplorer360 bit was something I discovered, or something everyone already "knew", but I figured since I couldn't find anything anywhere I might as well post it here, someone might find it useful. I'm not really certain how it read it myself, and while I doubt anyone is going to be willing to risk their data to try to replicate this it might be useful to add this at the bottom of an FAQ or sticky just so it doesn't get buried.

Hmm... I just tried it with PhotoRec, and it's weird; filenames aren't recognized with it, yet Xplorer V5 sees and restores filenames. I'm going to attempt to replicate the error on my 250 GB drive later during the week, I'll repost my findings in a whitepaper here if anyone is interested.