Upgrading To 500gb Ide Hdd, Need some help please before I lose my mind. Options

[Broxi1979]

Wow, thanks for all the help, I now have EvolutionX Dash booting up from C, now to add my apps and emulators, check they work ... after that stick a game on the HDD on F and check it works, that'll be the acid test.

After that I get to do it all again on a 500GB drive and get stuck in to the XBpartitioner bit, no doubt I'll be back to this thread lol.

Thanks again for helping me keep the old box alive.

Time for sleep now.

[obcd]

Yep, the evox dashboard that comes with slayers is old.
As a dashboard is just an application, you can get a recent one on the usual places and just ftp it over to your xbox harddisk.
I prefer Unleashx if the main purpose is gaming and xbmc if the main purpose is a media center.
xbmc boots a little slower as it has more features than unleashx. They both have a nice file explorer.
Your modchip looks like a cheapmod. It's a flash romchip with a buildin LPC interface.
Since you managed to update the bios, you probably don't care anymore.

regards.

[Broxi1979]

Yep, the evox dashboard that comes with slayers is old.
As a dashboard is just an application, you can get a recent one on the usual places and just ftp it over to your xbox harddisk.
I prefer Unleashx if the main purpose is gaming and xbmc if the main purpose is a media center.
xbmc boots a little slower as it has more features than unleashx. They both have a nice file explorer.
Your modchip looks like a cheapmod. It's a flash romchip with a buildin LPC interface.
Since you managed to update the bios, you probably don't care anymore.

regards.

I think you're right about the cheap mod, when I first got into modding my Xbox, it was sent to a friend of a friend to have the work done. Whether he realised they were cheap knock-offs (if that's what it is) I don't know.

Now that the BIOS is updated, it removes my main problem which was "what to do when my 500Gb arrives", I may indeed switch to UnleashX tho, I seemed to be having more luck with that anyway but on testing the EvolutionX dashboard I installed last night ... I now realise that although it looks fine on the face of it and the evoX.ini has all the paths correctly noted, none of the applications, emulators or Game on HDD gets past the loading screen.

Guess I'll have another go tonight at re-installing EvoX, UnleashX and Avalaunch and maybe have a tinker with XBPartitioner to see if that's been my problem.

My main use for this box will be to install emulators, roms and my old Xbox games all on hard drive, that way I can clear the clutter and just have one tidy box with all my stuff on it. I find my PS3 does a good enough job for my needs as a Media Centre these days, it lacks a lot of the functionality of XBMC but oh well, suits my needs.

You were a big help tho mate, thanks a lot.

[Broxi1979]

1. Just make sure you format the new disk with XBPartitioner 1.1, and check the cluster size with Evox once it's done. You can format it as you wish - just run it, then press A to cycle between the standard layouts:

- All F

Once you have selected your preferred layout, press Start to write the partition table to the disk, or press Back twice to quit. Note that you'll lose all data on F and G.

2. Once you've done that you'll need to check the cluster size

32kB for 256-512GB.

3. Fire up Evox as an application, edit the skin / config so you can see the free space on F and G.

4. FTP a 1 byte file to the F partitions. The drop in free space is the cluster size.

I have edited your post Heimdall to show what my prefered option would be, basically 500mb to 'C', 5Gb to 'E' and all the rest to 'F', with no 'G' partion.

Is that feasible or does partitions of this size cause problems?

My HDD just arrived so I will use the above a basic tutorial for my install. On my last HDD, I set the jumper settings to Cable Select, I assume this was correct?

There is a small glitch with the way XBPartioner 1.1 works. Because the drive was previously formatted and was the same size then XBPartitioner 1.1 sometimes doesn't reformat with the right cluster size. So, if the cluster size is too low then then you need to run XBPartitioner 1.1 and reformat the problem partition again twice. Make the problem partition smaller (press D-pad left, or right, can't remember which), reformat, then start XBPartitioner again and make the partition bigger again, and reformat. Check again with the 1 byte file, just to be certain that you now have 32k clusters.

I'll need to do my homework on the above as it's a bit like Double Dutch at the moment, I'll look for some guides.

Thanks,
Broxi

This post has been edited by Broxi1979: Oct 1 2010, 12:04 PM

[Heimdall]

All F is a perfectly sensible option. Cable select should work (but if not, set it to master).

XBPartitioner 1.1 is trivial to use once you've got it in front of you and you're looking at the screen.

[dballs442]

remember to format F with 32 clusters.

[Broxi1979]

remember to format F with 32 clusters.

Thanks, I used XBpartitioner and noticed it had Drive F to use 32k clusters.

Happy to report my 500gb HDD seems to be and running, I installed all my applications to E as they dont take up too much space, also installed SNES/Genesis/NES emulators to E .... all of these are running as expected ... woot

I installed my MAME emulator to 'F', mainly because my rom pack for mame is huge (about 8gb) and I wanted something to test that things were running OK on the F partition. This seems to run fine, I had a quick go of Street Fighter II ... awesome.

Only problem is my game ISO (SSX on Tour) isn't running from 'F', I just get a black screen. I didn't understand this as it worked perfectly from the 10gb HDD, so I decided to test that again ... I ftp'd the files over to the Game folder on my retail HDD and this time it froze at a black screen with a loading graphic in the bottom right.

Possibly something wrong with my ISO or any other ideas what it may be?

I'll try to rip Halo using DVD2Xbox app later to test this.

This post has been edited by Broxi1979: Oct 1 2010, 07:05 PM

[Broxi1979]

Halo ripped fine, as did Halo 2.

Seems to be an issue with that ISO ... hmmm

[obcd]

I know gamesaves can give issues as well.
If a gamesave for that specific game is corrupt, it can cause issues when the game is loading.

regards.

[Broxi1979]

I know gamesaves can give issues as well.
If a gamesave for that specific game is corrupt, it can cause issues when the game is loading.

regards.

Good advice, thanks. I gave up on the ISO and ripped it from disc and it seems fine now, also every other game I've tried so far has been OK.

I now have about 7 games on the hdd ... this is awesome, soon I'll can put away all of these discs that have been cluttering my place up.

Why didn't I do this sooner?

This post has been edited by Broxi1979: Oct 1 2010, 09:57 PM

[kenzo42]

Hi,
So I just successfully hotswapped and softmodded my Xbox using Kingroach's Ndure 3.1 and Xboxhdm 1.9 and Slayer's 2.7 stock c files, with Heimdall's guide. My dash is Unleash.

Now, I'd like to upgrade the HD.

Is there a preferred method of doing this, which is compatible Heimdall's softmod method?

I tried searching, however there seems to be so many methods in which I'm not sure if compatible.

Thanks.

This post has been edited by kenzo42: Feb 25 2012, 11:20 PM

[Heimdall]

There's a link in my signature ......