The Complete Guide To Producing , Extracting, And, Burning XBOX ISO Image Files (PC & MAC) Options

[HSDEMONZ]

It's in there.. simply out of order.. 1.1 was added after the original 6 sections were complete!

To read the unabridged version.. in order.. check out the HTML version of this guide in the TUTORIAL section of www.xbox-scene.com

[HSDEMONZ]

QUOTE

This may have been asked before but this is a fairly long thread and I didn't find anything on search just yet.... How many games actually don't fit on one DVD ? 25%, 50%, 75% ? TIA...

Only a few...

3 or 4 currently do not fit without tinkering around abit.

I think I list them.. read back! Alos we've got more than one thread detailing how many.. and some ways to fix thee issues for someof them.

[SZNAPS!]

when u said copying the games from the dvd drive in the xbox you didn't mean dumping the game onto the xbox then using ftp to copy onto your pc rite? you mean just copying the files directly from the retail game disc. can you still do this if the game boots? how do you make the game not boot?

[b0ink]

Duh.... Turn on the XBox without the game in it.

[HSDEMONZ]

QUOTE

when u said copying the games from the dvd drive in the xbox you didn't mean dumping the game onto the xbox then using ftp to copy onto your pc rite? you mean just copying the files directly from the retail game disc. can you still do this if the game boots? how do you make the game not boot?

OKAY.. first.. My GUIDE assumes that you have installed EVOX! I won't go into detail about EVOX.. as we have both a dedicated forum. and some great tutorials online!

However.. You have a couple of options... but they need EVOX to be booted.. and on screen.

With EVOX loaded (and AUTOPLAY GAMES off.. you can either connect directly to the DVD.. and FTP from the DVD to the PC HD.

You can also take the extra step.. of Sending the DVD to the XBOX HD first.. using XBCopy. Then from the XBOX HD.. FTP it to the PC HD. This is actually clearly detailed in the GUIDE!

[HSDEMONZ]

New Release: xISO v1.15
>> What's new/fixed:
* Recoded xISO creator because sometimes makes bad ISO files, sorry to all ppl , and a lot of thnx to Shawn (scr.bladeforce6@verizon.net), who works as betatester .
* Added some tool button to the toolbar.
* Added xISO Studio, now you can make your xISOs like Nero.

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HAH! For over 6 months.. we've been telling everyone that XISO produces a BAD ISO! It's nice to finally force YURSOFT to admit to it!

Months of DENIAL by YURSOFT.. and people who have supported XISO as an ISO creation tool... and finally.. we get the truth! This campaign to get people to see the light has finally paid off. Now.. to get everyone who is currently still using XISO to switch to better methods.

In the weeks and months ahead.. XEERO and Myself will do research into whether or not the NEW XISO truly FIXES the age old problems it has carried along with it since the beginning!

Follow this thread.. and Postings by XEERO and MR ED.. for more Info!

[Yursoft]

Hi HSDEMONZ,

In xISO works the extraction 100%, except for some bad isos made it by other tools that dont follow the correct steps to create a XDFS ISO (not GDFIMAGE lol).

The xISO creation section failed (<=1.10) when exists a lot files in the same folder.....
I didnt correct it soon because until February I dont chipped my xbox and Shawn become as betatester...
Technically the problem of xISO was the left node of directory sectors > 2048 bytes.
By other hand, only two or three persons (of up to 300 emails I received) report me that some games didnt work with the xISO.... I think, mmmm maybe they are doing something wrong or they dont ripped well the game....

By this reasons I didnt fixed quickly the xISO problem. Sorry for all coasters.

Bye
Yursoft

This post has been edited by Yursoft: Mar 16 2003, 09:11 AM

[HSDEMONZ]

Well.. I appreciate YURSOFT finally admitting to the problems...

As he stated.. having no CHIPEED XBOX during the developement of the tool meant he has never properly tested his program during most of the time he has been producing it. Shame.

I'm also glad that he states some specific examples why it has been flawed. Course.. independant research tell us that it still has other issues.

As for the 2-3 people out of 300...

We have 2-3 hundred posts about people using XISO in it's entirety.. and getting coasters unrelated to MEDIA issues. Until XISO properly duplicates the GDF layout 100%.. I suspect XISO produced images will always have issues.

Pirate scene release groups (too numerous tyo list) still use various versions of XISO.. and we still see the occassional FLAWS because of it. XISO has been the cause of countless coasters for 6-8 months now. The fact that it is still used and available is beyond me.. especially when the CLEARLY better tools are locatable.

NOTE: XBOX-SCENE does not condone or endorse the use of Pirate scene releases.

I will however.. encourage members of XS.. to NOT USE XISO until it's issues are all cleared up!

We have a number of TOOLS that produce PERFECT functional BACKUPS.. and as long as we have these other tools and methods.. XISO will not be encouraged.

With the Author admitting the incompetance of the product.. I can finally lay the issue to rest! I'd like to thank YURSOFT for finally contacting us directly.. and letting us know that the product is flawed.

[HSDEMONZ]

#1.. I have NOT BEEN HARSH! Research.. and EXPERIENCE.. plus the hundreds.. and I do mean hundreds.. or posts.. about the problems cause by XISO from version 0.73 to 1.15. The jury is still out on 1.15.. but from preliminary reports.. ISO's produced by XISO do not still properly MIMIC a properly produced ISO! Period!

This isn't really an issue for open discussion.. for 8 months we have been here helping people with all the problems caused by the program. Direct and Indirect.

YURSOFT is welcome to provide TECH support in the THREAD created for him!

This GUIDE is intended to help people produce BACKUPS that work RELIABLY! PERIOD!

I'll be adding some new software to the mix soon.. and some entire new sections like MR ED's MAC GUIDE!


---

This is a SEALED thread.. anyone who wish to ADD to the RESEARCH.. contact me.

This post has been edited by HSDEMONZ: Apr 17 2003, 04:21 AM

[HSDEMONZ]

Well.. I'll be adding alot of new section.. during the next 3 weeks to this thread.. including all of the new tools, and method to burn/backup etc. Some written by me.. some written by others.

[HSDEMONZ]

The Complete Guide to Backing-up XBOX Games via Mac OS X by MR ED! (thanks)

POSTMARKER: MREDSMACBACKUPGUIDE

NOTE: The PICS will be fixed in a day or two... (hopefully)

Ok, before you begin you need the following:

- An XBOX with a working mod chip installed.
- The EvolutionX Dashboard (on CD-RW in my example) but it could also be installed on your hard drive.
- The XBOX connected to your network with a valid IP address
- A Mac OS X based computer connected to the network with a valid IP address and a DVD-R drive
- FTP program for Mac OS X (a GUI based FTP utility... Why? Because command line support doesn't work that well in EvolutionX. You should be able to use most GUI FTP clients, such as Fetch or Interarchy. In this example I'm using Interarchy)
- Optionally: Virtual PC installed on your Mac (running Windows 2000 or XP and with GDFImage or IsoMaker (which uses GDFImage) installed.)
- A blank DVD-R or DVD-RW (or +R or +RW)
- A game disc you want to backup.

Ok, we are starting from the point that...

You have a working EvolutionX disc that boots up your XBOX and that your XBOX is networked correctly. If you have a DHCP server on your network, the default settings for EvolutionX should setup the network and grab an IP address for you, otherwise you'll have had to setup EvolutionX to us a manual IP address. If you are connecting just your Mac to your XBOX via a crossover cable, you can tell your Mac to be a DHCP server by going into System Preferences, opening Sharing, clicking the Internet tab, check "share the connection with other computers on Built-in Ethernet" and click start. Note that this turns on a DHCP server in Mac OS X. About the only time this is a good idea is if you are on your own isolated network because on any other network, you will most likely cause conflicts with other DHCP servers. You never want to have more than one DHCP server on any network at a time.

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Ok, first, let's load up EvolutionX on our XBOX. So, power up the XBOX and insert the EvolutionX CD-RW you created. (for info. On creating that CD, you can look elsewhere. I'll be adding that info. later or as a separate tutorial. Also, for networking issues, you'll need to look elsewhere, this tutorial is already bigger than I intended.)

You should see this after EvolutionX has booted up.



First we need to know what our IP address is to connect to the XBOX. It should be pretty obvious that you use the joypad to navigate the menus. A selects the current highlighted item, and B moves back to the previous screen.

Scroll down to System Utils. And Hit A to select it.



Then select Settings.



Now your assigned IP address is in blue on the second line.



In this picture above, you can see something is wrong as I have no assigned IP address. The second line is blank. There is also something wrong if it displays 0.0.0.0. You can also see my Line Status is "No Link!" That's because I haven't plugged in my Ethernet cable yet. The most common cause of confusion is that below on the 7th line, there is an IP listed. Ok, this is a "manual IP" if your EvolutionX is setup to use a fixed IP setting (which it is not by default, by default it wants to use DHCP to get an IP assigned to it.) It's beyond the scope of this tutorial to explain how to setup your EvolutionX CD to boot up with a fixed IP versus the default DHCP setting, but you can learn about it elsewhere. Also, if you have setup a manual IP address, then lines 2 and 7 should be identical. If they aren't, than some setting is wrong.

Ok, so again, the only IP we care about is the one on the second line, which in the last picture was blank so we knew we had a problem. Now I've connected my Ethernet cable. Now you have to reboot (power cycle or select Reboot from the EvolutionX menu) to get your IP address assigned via DHCP. I know Macs don't need to reboot for this type of thing, but we're dealing with an MS operating system here, so just be happy you don't get a blue screen of death ;-)



Ok, you can see on the second line, I have the address of 192.168.1.10. While it's hard to tell on this screenshot, that line of text is in blue. Notice the IP below on line 7 listed in white is 192.168.0.3. These IPs are different. It's just coincidence that these IPs look confusingly similar. Most likely when using a DHCP server these IPs won't be the same. Now, if you have setup a manual IP address, then lines 2 and 7 should be identical. Ok, but the point is, we now know how to get to our XBOX via ftp. We use the blue IP that is shown on the second line. If you don't have an IP address there, or it is 0.0.0.0 you cannot proceed and will have to change either your networking setup (such as adding a DHCP server to your network) or modifying the EvolutionX CD to use a fixed IP address. Now we insert the game DVD that we want to backup. You should be able to eject the EvolutionX dashboard CD-RW without resetting the XBOX. Go ahead and hit eject and place the DVD you want to backup in the XBOX.


Now, my screen (even though I just loaded a new game DVD) is still showing the EvolutionX setting info. we just looked at. The important thing to realize is that as this point, your game DVD has been mounted internally to the XBOX and that the EvolutionX dashboard is running an FTP server on our XBOX instead of actually launching the game.

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This post has been edited by HSDEMONZ: Aug 22 2003, 03:48 AM

[HSDEMONZ]

<continued...>

Now go to your Mac and launch your favorite FTP app. I'm using Interarchy, which I've found to be the best FTP app on the Mac. It used to be shareware, however, I've been told it is getting hard to get a trial version. Anyway, I'd encourage you to pony up the small amount of money (less than $50 US) they ask for as it is a good app with good support. Anyway before we begin our download, we need to change some default settings in Interarchy. Since we are working with non-Macintosh files, we don't want any translation or post processing to happen to these files. These can be found under Interarchy -> Preferences... To be safe (meaning I don't know if any of these need to be done), I deselected "Post Process Files", and "Ignore .files". I also told it not to ignore files in parentheses but I'm guessing that won't be important.



We're not done with our settings yet, and this is the most important one. Select File -> Transfer Mode -> As Binary to make sure we don't change the line endings of text files to Macintosh line endings. THIS IS THE MOST COMMON SOURCE OF PROBLEMS WHEN MAC USERS HAVE TROUBLE.



We need to retain the DOS line endings for these files to work when we put them back on the XBOX. You should be aware the settings on the preference window will be retained on subsequent launches of Interarchy, however, this Transfer Mode setting will always default back to by File Mapping, so you need to check that setting every time . I've gotten in touch with the developer and have asked them to allow that setting to be retained after subsequent launches, but as of version 6.0.1, you are still going to have to check it every time.

Ok, now we are ready to actually transfer some files. Select File -> FTP -> Manual FTP Listing. Shown here



After selecting, you should see something like this:



For Server, enter the IP on the second line from the EvolutionX screen. For username and password, enter xbox and xbox. Then click the List button to connect and get a directory listing.

Now, if you are going through any kind of router (I am in this example as we are ftping from my XBOX through my wireless Airport networking to my laptop, the Airport base station is a "router") you will need to turn on Passive FTP mode. Basically if you can't connect, checking passive on/off to change the current setting is probably the first thing to try. One of the cool features of Interarchy is that it knows this and if it can't connect will give you this dialog:



If you get this message, click OK and hope that you connect now.

Assuming you have connected, you should get a window showing the hard drive partitions, or in MS-DOS speak, the drive letters (remember MS OSes don't let you name your hard drives even here in 2003. Funny huh?) Anyway, you should see a window like this:



The D drive is the DVD-ROM drive. In other words, any game you put in the XBOX's drive, will be in the D drive. You want to copy the D drive to get this game. Ok, so now comes the easy part. Just grab the D folder icon, and drop it into a directory that has enough space for the game (depending on the game that could be 500MB or 5+GB). If you prefer to use menus, you can also select the D folder icon and click Listing -> Download. You will get a nice progress bar telling you the total amount that needs to be transferred, how much has been transferred and an estimated time until completion. It should look like this:



Well, that was fun. It took about 30 minutes and we averaged around 450KBps (kilobytes per second) or 3,600Kbps (kilobits per second) or 3.6Mbps (megabits per second). That's ok considering we were going over my wireless Airport network. Now that was 30 minutes for a 700MB game. So a 4GB game would take a couple of hours. If you have a direct network connection you should get much better speeds. Something around 1.5 to 2MBps (Megabytes per second) or 2,000KBps (Kilobytes per second) or 16Mbps (Megabits per second) or 16,000Kbps (Kilobits per second). At that speed our 700MB game takes about 6 minutes and a 4GB game would take just over half an hour.

Anyway, great, so now I have a folder on my Mac OS X drive called D, which contains all the files from the XBOX game DVD. The directory structure will be different, of course, for every game, but should look something like this:



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This post has been edited by HSDEMONZ: May 25 2003, 04:55 AM

[HSDEMONZ]

<continued from last post...>

Note for games that are larger than 4.7GB (or greater than the size of a single blank DVD-R):
Ok, the theoretical maximum for an XBOX game (because they are dual layer DVDs) is around 8.5GB. Almost twice when can fit on a DVD-R disc. There are already a few games that are bigger than 4.7GB and there are bound to be more as game makers include more language support and higher quality video. In order to burn a backup of a game like this, you will have to either downsample audio and video to make it smaller and/or remove "extra" files such as demos or PAL/NTSC or foreign languages. This varies greatly game by game and is beyond the scope of this tutorial.



Games as of this writing that are too big to fit on a DVD-R:
(I didn't check these personally, so I can't verify the accuracy of this list)


Shenmue 2
Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance
Onimusha
Street Hoops
Enter the Matrix


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Now we need to prepare the files and burn them onto a DVD-R. The most reliable method of preparing files for the XBOX is to use MS's GDFImage tool. This tool ships with the XDK (XBOX Development Kit) and therefore cannot be distributed without violating copyright. However, you can find it on the net. This is also a command line tool. IsoMaker is a GUI front end for the command line tool, which I also recommend using. Often you will find IsoMaker includes GDFImage when you download it. Lastly, yes, this is a Windows 2000/XP application and therefore needs to be run on a Windows PC or on a Mac under Virtual PC. It will not run properly under Windows 95, 98, or Me.

There is another way to image an XBOX game disc. UDF or Universal Disc Format is the other DVD format that the XBOX understands. There is an advantage to UDF... you can image a disc in UDF using tools that are Mac OS X native which means you don't need Virtual PC or a Windows PC. There is a disadvantage to UDF... some games load slow, or possibly not at all in UDF format. This is because MS developed GDF with one thing in mind: To get the files on the DVD organized in a way to speed up loading. Obviously if they bothered to come up with a native XBOX disc format, that is going to be the most efficient way of making an XBOX DVD. So, it is up to you to decide how to proceed. I recommend, until you have made at least a couple successful backups that run on your XBOX, that you should use GDFImage. After you have made a couple successful ones, you can experiment with UDF and see how it works for you. There have been reports of certain games and certain XBOXs that work better with UDF than others. I have successfully backed up games in UDF, but I personally use the GDF method exclusively because I don't want to deal with possible speed issues later.

GDF Method: <--preferred

Now... go ahead and launch Virtual PC. You'll need either 2000 or XP as GDFImage requires libraries that only shipped with those newer OSes. We'll be using IsoMaker 1.21 and GDFImage. (Note there are other interfaces to GDFImage these days such as Craxtion. I can't continually update this tutorial for every new app that comes out. The basic interfaces/steps are the same, and I can't really recommend one over another, although Craxtion seems pretty popular these days.) After launching ISOMaker Your screen should look something like this:



Oh, here's a tip for working with Virtual PC. Instead of copying the files and images to the hard drive of Virtual PC, just use the Folder Sharing features to share any directories on your Mac that have your XBOX files on them. You can see by IsoMaker's window, that before I started I setup two shared folders under Virtual PC. My Z drive is shared into a folder (XBOX Good) on the hard drive of my laptop (Titanium HD) which is where I want IsoMaker to create the .ISO image for me. The Y drive is shared to a network drive (120 GB HD) in the directory (Others). You will most likely want to setup something similar to make it easy to access the ISO images outside of Virtual PC.



When using IsoMaker, it's important to make sure you select the correct directory. Simply clicking and highlighting the directory doesn't select it (strange, I know) but you have to double click it. This changes its icon to an open folder and indicates you have the correct directory selected.



It looks like DOAVB is selected, but RIPS is currently selected.



This makes sense, DOAVB, is selected.



Type in a filename for the .ISO file, and go ahead and click make. IsoMaker will disappear and launch the command line tool GDFImage with the parameters needed. Imaging a disc can take a while so "now might be a good time to go make yourself a cheese sandwich" (or you can spend your time trying to identify that quote).


When GDFImage is finally done, its window will just close without a message or anything. As long as an ISO file was created with the name you gave it, you can assume it worked ok.


Ok, you can burn that ISO file now.

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This post has been edited by HSDEMONZ: May 25 2003, 05:02 AM

[HSDEMONZ]

<continued from last post..>

Here's another tip, the XBOX, Windows 2000, and Windows XP are all based on 1970's OS technology developed by MS. Some applications under these OSes still experience anomalies when you use spaces or special characters ( / : * ? " < > |) in filenames, or your filenames are larger than the old 8.3 standard, so I recommend when using IsoMaker, GDFImage, or any other Windows tools that work with XBOX files, trying to leave special characters and spaces out of the directory and filenames and limit the .ISO filenames to 8.3 in length. Once you are back in your Mac OS X environment you can rename your .ISO files however you want.

Note for games that are larger than 4GB in Virtual PC...

Please see Addendum 1 at the end of this tutorial for working with files larger than 4GB in Virtual PC.



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UDF Method:

Once you've gotten some successful backups using GDFImage, and you want to experiment with an entirely Mac OS X solution (i.e. dumping Virtual PC and the Windows software) it's time to consider UDF.


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Recommended UDF method--> This will allow you, in one step, and all in Mac OS X, to burn a DVD in UDF format...

Roxio claims that Toast does not create or support making DVDs in UDF format. However, I've done it so I don't know what's up with that. In Toast, to create a UDF format DVD, just select DVD from the "Other" menu and drag the files you want into the Toast window.


Don't select Disc Image as is shown in this screenshot, select DVD just above it.

Click burn, and you should have a UDF format DVD. I've done this a couple of times and it worked fine, even though, everyone says you can't do this. At this point you are done. Wow, it was almost too easy.

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Disk Copy can burn UDF formatted ISO images, however, it cannot prepare in UDF format natively. So before we can use this application, we need to create an ISO image in UDF format with some other program.

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Other UDF methods including command line:
Mac OS X ships with a command line tool (or at least its available in the Darwin developer stuff) called mkisofs (for make ISO file system). Unfortunately the version you can get from Apple is too old to support UDF. There are compatible newer mkisofs for Mac OS X however. The best way to get the correct mkisofs on your computer (this will be a unix command line app) is to use fink. Using fink and installing the mkisofs package via fink could be its own tutorial, so I'm not going to go into it here. You can find fink here:

http://fink.sourceforge.net/

Fink is very cool. It is an automatic system of installing unix applications that have been ported to Mac OS X. It's not for the faint of heart however, as it's all unix/command line based. If you think you can handle the difficulties of UDF format, and you are up to using Mac OS X's UNIX command line, then you should be using fink. Once you have mkisofs installed an example command line would be:

mkisofs -v -udf -o <imagename.iso> <directoryname>

Where imagename.iso is the resulting image file you want to create and directoryname is the starting directory containing our files (in our case, since we dragged the D drive over from the XBOX, directoryname would be D if we were launching mkisofs from the directory just above where we copied our D directory).

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Other Methods/Mac OS X GUI apps:

These are still going to create UDF images that you can then burn and the same caveats for using UDF apply to these, but by having a GUI it can make creating an image easier.


OsXboxISO
This application didn't work for me. I've been told since I tried it and deleted it, that it has a problem with any directory or filename with a space in it. I can't think of a single directory on my Mac that doesn't have a space so I didn't bother creating directories just for it without spaces and trying it again. If they come out with a new version, I will try it again.


osXiso B3 GUI
This worked. It's basically a GUI front end for the command line mkisofs that we discussed earlier. But it ships with a precompiled mkisofs that you don't have to use fink to install. Just drop the mkisofs it includes into your Applications/Utilities directory. I expect a new version will be out some time giving it "browse" buttons to locate the directories/files you want to use. Right now you have to type in the entire pathname which actually makes it as hard, if not harder to use than mkisofs via the command line (because at least with a command line app, you can just drag and drop the directory onto the terminal window to get the pathname.)


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[HSDEMONZ]

<continued from last post...>

Burn baby, burn...

Ok, now we have a disc image as an ISO file. I've found two methods that work. You can use Toast Titanium 5.2 (the latest version as of this writing) or the Disk Copy application that is part of Mac OS X.

Disk Copy Method: <--preferred
To use Disk Copy, first launch Disk Copy. It will be in the Applications/Utilities folder. After you launch it, just go to File->Burn Image. You'll be presented with a standard file selection dialog. Just select the ISO we created. Then you should see a dialog that looks like this:



You may have to click the details triangle to see all the options. Make sure Allow additional burns is deselected. If you haven't already, insert your media and click Burn. You're done!


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Toast Method: (Since Disk Copy is so easy, everyone has it as it is included with Mac OS X, I may remove the Toast method in future versions.)

To use Toast I used Toast Titanium 5.2. I haven't tried other versions but I've been told anything before 5.2 might not work. Go ahead and launch Toast. Click the options menu and select Disc Image.



Now, it says "(Drop a disc image file here)", but you cannot drag and drop the disc image onto the window because Toast appears to automatically make some selections that do not work with these images. Instead, click the "Select..." button.



In the file selection dialog, deselect the Auto-Detect Format option and then select your ISO file. In the window that pops up, the defaults of 0 Pregap, 0 Postgap, and 2048 Sector Size, with Scrambled off are fine.



When you are ready, click the Record button. I'd go ahead and let Toast do the verification afterward. I've been surprised how much DVD media will fail verification which is usually just an indication of cheap DVD media.

That should be it. Have fun.


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