Why Does My Xbox Stall So Much?, Between bios/dash load & apps/games Options

[ericclemmons]

Q: My XBox stalls for a couple minutes after the BIOS loads and its trying to load the dash. Also, whenever i launch any app (XBMP or Emulator) there's an long pause (showing a black screen) before anything loads. What the heck is going on? Did i screw up on the soldering?

A: Most likely, if you can boot and load an app (even w/ a long delay) you modded it fine.. The problem (for me) was because i had a pos (piece of poopy) Maxtor HDD:

MAXTOR: MODEL 42049H4. 16383 Cylinders. 16 Heads. 63 Sectors.

Its a small, 20 gb harddrive. Either way, it can't be locked and it had serious read issues.

Here's how applications work. They typically have to COMPLETE LOAD ALL OF THEIR EXECUTABLE CODE before execution. That causes the long delay, because ths pos hdd has to keep re-reading the bad sectors until the information is correct.

::Well, HOW THE HECK DO I FIX IT?::

Go grab a Western Digital Caviar WD1200BB 120GB ATA/100 7200RPM Hard Drive for $97 (as of 26-6-03) and all of your problems will be over.

Mine sure were. Now everything loads/runs perfect and quick!

Thank God it wasn't another soldering issue!

Eric

[Doubt]

I too am having a similar issue. I have an 80 gig Maxtor drive (not exactly sure of the model number) but I've had it for a number of years. I decided to move this older drive to my XBox instead of buying a new drive for it.

My sluggishness comes and goes though. Sometimes I can get to apps in a matter of seconds... but other times it takes 5 minutes to load MameOx or even a game off the hard drive... and forget about load times.

I was wondering if there was any XBox hard disk maintenance software that could test my drive's reading capabilites... or maybe some XBox defragmentation software or something. I'm already leaning toward purchasing that 120 gig Western Digital drive, but I thought maybe I'd explore some options first. Any ideas?

--Doubt