Xbox 360 Linux Install On Any Hard Drive? Options

[dervboy]

do i have to use a 20, 60 or 120GB hard drive to install linux on? or am i able to go and buy any old sata drive, install in the m$ drive case and use that?

im not sure how the system talks to the drive once you are in linux, so my next question is, do i need to flash the firmware of the sata drive to be able to do this, as well?

thanks

[openxdkman]

It seems so.
I purchased a used 20Gb official hard drive (40 bucks) and a Scorpio WD1200 BEVS 120Gb (40 bucks)
I didn't hack anything, I just opened the official hard drive case (8 screws) and removed the 20Gb hard drive (I will keep it aside as official hard drive if I need games patches etc...) and I replaced it with the WD1200.

Now, if you have :
- Vulnerable kernel written in firmware with current valid lock down value
- King Kong stealth patched (serial or not)
- iXtreme 1.51
- Gentoo Live Beta 2 CD
then just boot KK, then Gentoo with hard drive docked (360 won't recognize it, it's normal), set your keyboard version and open a terminal window

(this is taken from free60 ubuntu7.10/debian installation scripts)
(become root superuser:)
sudo su
(erase hard disk boot sector:)
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1
(partition hard disk 1gb for swap and 119gb for the rest:)
sfdisk /dev/sda
,124,S
,,L
nothing
nothing
y
(format 2nd partition with ext3 format:)
mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda2
(format 1st partition to turn it into a swap partition:)
mkswap /dev/sda1

then, each time you boot with Gentoo you can use the hard disk :

sync; sync; sync
swapon /dev/sda1
mkdir /mnt/myhdd
mount /dev/sda2 /mnt/myhdd
cd /mnt/myhdd

At least it's a 1st step, you can keep persistent files (119gb for 80bucks in total! +official 20Gb)

Btw, I failed the reboot phase of the unbuntu 7.10 installation procedure, so I will stick to Gentoo live cd for now (I get insane irq #36 firing while booting the sda2 cd. Maybe it's because I use serial and xell_choice
but well, I don't despair to understand what's going on...)

EDIT:
Choosing Scorpio WD1200 BEVS is interesting because it opens a future possibility to flash its firmware and turn it into an official 360 120gb hard drive (hddhackr91 flasher, by the specialist, requires this model). But for now, just use it as a big and cheap repository for your Unix files.

EDIT2:
Using XELL-Bootloader-sda2-v2.6.21.1.iso instead of the more recent one suggested by free60.org Linux installation guides may prevent irq36 from firing all the time (I will test later, I have no free time atm).
It's not an easy file to obtain but if you look for
"XELL-Bootloader-sda2-v2.6.21.1.rar" with altavista search engine you
may find one.

This post has been edited by openxdkman: May 25 2009, 06:26 PM

[dervboy]

yea it works with any drive as to be expected. im running ubuntu on my xbox now... except i have no use for ubuntu as i run kubuntu on my main machine with a dual boot for vista, and with virtual xp media centre for all my work i do with a 32 bit machine.

[epathchina]

thanks the lz, i really want to kown the question.