So I'm still stumped about the games..
I can get Madden 2008 to play in all ways with the original HD, xecuter2 enabled/disabled... doesn't matter.
BUT, with the drives created by xboxhdm, I can't get the game to play at all... not even with the MS dash and the chip disabled...
The drive was locked fine - I can boot to the MS dash...set the clock, etc...
I also tried with the drive unlocked, b/c I really don't care about XBox Live or using the MS dash... Evox and XBMC still worked same, but again the game wouldn't load. It just freezes with the "LOADING" message when launched from Evox... tried launching from XBMC, and it just freezes with a black screen.
Games were ripped with dvd2xbox.
I even tried ftp-ing the games that were ripped with dvd2xbox with the original HD, b/c that game worked from the HD... didn't seem to matter.
I'm now testing the ripping from the new HDs that can't play the games... going to rip with dvd2xbox with the new drive, back up to network share, and copy over to original HD to verify that the rips work... not that it will help me much, but it'll validate the dvd2xbox on the new drives.
There has to be some kind of validation that fails b/c of the new drives! Someone has to have gone through this before, no?
I just picked up another Xbox on the cheap, so I'll have another machine to play around with... hopefully the DVD drive is more compatible with my media - I might be able to swap the drive out and use the xbox-boot method to install the new drives.
But - in the meantime, PLEASE HELP! I can't seem to stop working on this

and my wife is getting fed up (you know the feeling!!!!)
JB256