Hard Drive Died During Upgrade Options

[welandB]

I successfully softmodded my xbox using a combination of the Splinter Cell savegame exploit and ldot's brilliant xboxhdm2.1 (usb) and his tutorial on Xbrowser360.

As everyone here knows, there were two unavoidable problems with this. First, the stock hd is small, even for seven years old. Second, once you start a mod project, you tend to keep going.

SO! I pulled out a spare Samsung 160gb hd and ran xboxhdm2.1 again (my PC has only one PATA connector which defaults to IDE 4, so I can't use xboxhdm1.9 since it requires the hd to be the primary master). I ran through the process and plugged it into my xbox. But I forgot to lock it, so I went back to the pc with it and locked it, then plugged it into the xbox. Error 21. Before I suspected that it was because I simply missed a step in his Xbrowser360 tutorial (Delete xbox.xtf and xbox book.xtf in partition 3 root in step 4), I decided to just rebuild the hd from scratch using xboxhdm's option #1.

In the middle of this, I had to leave the house. The last thing on the console I saw was that it was making the F partition. When I returned home, my computer was off and other appliances indicated that my house lost powered while I was out.

I attempted to resume the process, preparing it as a new hd with xboxhdm yet again. Not only did I have no luck, I suspect a corrupted partition on a locked drive. In no particular order, I've tried:

• xboxhdm option 1 - says it can not find /dev/hda which isn't surprising as Slax spews errors about /dev/hda upon loading. They go by too fast for me to see what they are.
• unlockhd -p XBOXSCENE /dev/hda - gives an I/O error
• estool from Samsung for low-level format - sticks on infinite loop saying I/O error on LBA 40
• computer management in Vista Business 64bit says drive is Unknown with no option to initialize disk
• Gparted bootable cd won't even load - sticks on infinite loop attempting to access drive
• fdisk from FreeDOS returns I/O error

Does anyone have any other ideas? I have a WD 120gb drive that I can use, but that 33% more space is pretty attractive.

This post has been edited by welandB: Dec 11 2009, 09:47 AM

[obcd]

Since your harddisk is locked, you will need to unlock it first before you can do other things with it.
There is no partition program that will be able to break the lock.

As you could lock your harddisk with the xboxhdm 2.1 software, it should also be the one able to unlock that drive again.

Some pc biosses have problems with locked harddisks. They put the harddisk in a freeze state so that it won't unlock anymore. Sometimes, disabling the auto hdd detection in the bios solves this issue.

In your case, I would try to find an old pc, and use that to unlock the harddisk again.
You can also disable the security so that it stays unlocked.

regards.

[kingroach]

for master password "XBOXSCENE" you cant use option 3. You have to go to option 4 and use "atapwd" to unlock the disk.

[welandB]

Since posting this last night, I've successfully softmodded my 120GB WD hd, so I'm fresh and familiar with the process needed.

Since I don't have a computer that has a master IDE PATA connection, I can't run xboxhdm1.9. I'm sure you all aren't familiar with xboxhdm2.1, but if you are, bear with the explanation.

Since your harddisk is locked, you will need to unlock it first before you can do other things with it.
There is no partition program that will be able to break the lock.

As you could lock your harddisk with the xboxhdm 2.1 software, it should also be the one able to unlock that drive again.

I've tried this using xboxhd2 (the first tool used in xboxhdm2.1). When running it, I see the options:

1. Unlock hd
2. Start part 2 of process using xboxhdm <- this loads xboxhdm in a QEMU environment, mounting the drives appropriately
3. Lock hd
4. Quit

I select option #1, unlock hd. This worked with both my original drive and my WD hd. With the 160GB Samsung (the one I borked), it returns the error message "/dev/hda : no such file or directory" and tells me to shutdown and reconnect the drive.

If I select #2 with the Samsung, it tells me that the /dev/hda image isn't mounted or some such.

It seems that Slax isn't properly configuring the drive to be used upon booting. When I boot Slax with a working locked drive, it gives me a few I/O errors on the screen and scrolls by slowly enough for me to read them, but I can still unlock the drive using xboxhd2. When I boot Slax with the Samsung connected, I notice errors referring to it, but they scroll by way too fast for me to read, indicating that it's a different kind of error than a simple locked drive. If the errors would be helpful in identifying the problem and someone can tell me how to dump the boot log to a file (or where it is if done so automatically), I can post it.

I'd like to low-level format the drive and start anew, but I don't know how to do that without mounting it first in linux or dos. As it seems to have a corrupted partition table, Slax and Gparted can't mount it during boot (pure speculation on my part).

[obcd]

Have you tried the Master and cable select settings of the drive?

Are you sure all pin's of the harddisk ide connector are fine?

When you connect the harddisk to your pc, does it show up in the bios?
Is your bios able to detect the drive?

Try to find a diagnostic tool on the drive manufacturer website.
If those can't detect your drive, it's probably defective.

regards.

[welandB]

Have you tried the Master and cable select settings of the drive?

Yes.

Are you sure all pin's of the harddisk ide connector are fine?

Yes.

When you connect the harddisk to your pc, does it show up in the bios?
Is your bios able to detect the drive?

It does detect the drive properly.

Try to find a diagnostic tool on the drive manufacturer website.
If those can't detect your drive, it's probably defective.

I downloaded ESTool from Samsung's website and loaded it using a FreeDOS flash drive as I don't have a floppy drive. It loaded and I could see the drive info, but when I selected low level format, it gave me an infinite loop of I/O error on the drive at LBA 40.

The drive seems physically fine. I used it in my PC before drafting it into my mod project, plus I ran all the xboxhdm2.1 tools on it prior to the power loss and everything seemed normal during that.

[obcd]

Try the ATAPWD program with the freedos boot setup.
It should report if your drive is in a locked state or not.

If it's not locked, than it should be accesible by a partitioning program.
I also like the winhex program for low level analyses of drives.
You can wipe the Master Boot Record with it.

You can find a trial version on the internet for free.

regards.