Slow Running Games Options

[JonnieMazda]

I just modded a xbox for the first time using ndure and hdm. After it was modded I upgraded to a old 400gb IDE hard drive I found. I think somewhere along the way I clicked something to add a G partition though am not positive. When in evox (dashboard) the skin shows the G partition as having 0mb free. Everything seemed to work fine . I added XBMC and Coinops and they both seem to work fine. My problem came when I tried to play Halo off of the hard drive for the first time. The initial Loading screen took longer than usual and when I tried to play the first level it took about 8 minutes to load. That grey loading screen where the light slowly moves across would have the light move forward and then back a little and so on until the level started. On a normal modded xbox running halo off the hard drive it should only take a few seconds. The game did work though, parts of the level seemed a little choppy or slow. I then put the disk in to see how fast it loaded and it was also super slow. When trying to research what might be wrong I've come across a few people saying that the F partition needs to be formatted using 32 clusters using xbpartioner. Is there a way to tell if my F partition is already formatted that way? Also is that something that could cause this slow game loading or is it something else?

Thanks in advance

-Jonnie

[Heimdall]

By "ndure and hdm" presumably you mean Kingroach NDURE 3.1 and xboxhdm 1.9? These sorts of details are often useful when troubleshooting......

Clearing the cache (E:\cache\) and the X, Y and Z partitions should help make your games run better.

On the disk size / cluster size front, we may as well cut to the chase. Reformat your drive using XBPartitioner 1.1 (and yes, the version is important!) and that will sort out the cluster size, and importantly will write an on-disk partition table. The link in my signature explains how to do that, and how to check the cluster size. That will allow you to set up F and G properly (or you could just have one large F partition)

[JonnieMazda]

Yes, I meant NDURE 3.1 and xboxhdm 1.9. So I figured I'd get the reformatting out of the way so I used XBPartitioner 1.1 to reformat my F and G partitions. I then checked cluster sizes by dropping a 1 byte file into each partition. My F partition is 32 and my G partition is 16 as I only made it 10gb small. I then deleted the contents of my /E/CACHE/ folder and of my X Y and Z partitions. I then used dvd2xbox to rip my halo dvd to E/GAMES. When I tested it out it still has the slow loading issue. After the level loaded 5 minutes later I exited the game and then started it again. I resumed my game and it loaded instantly from the cache. Just to be thorough I rebooted deleted my cache again and tried to play off the disk. The same slow loading occurred. So it would seem to me that my xbox is having trouble writing to the cache, but can read from it fine. Any Ideas what could cause this.


Thanks again for the help.


-Jonnie

[Heimdall]

No, that sounds perfectly normal. First run of Halo takes an age to load the textures etc. into the cache, second run loads in a few seconds. I've always suspected that the disk handling code is designed to copy from DVD to the cache on the hard drive, but not to copy from one part of the hard drive to another, and that there is some small, subtle, easy to fix if you knew where to look, tweak that would fix this.

Not related to your problem, but I'm struggling with why you'd want a 10GB G partition. Why not make one large ~390GB F partition?

This post has been edited by Heimdall: Feb 22 2012, 10:11 PM

[JonnieMazda]

Hmm, well I have another modded xbox that someone else modded for me a long long time ago. It has been a media center for years so there is no way that halo would still be in its cache. I just loaded Halo off the hard drive for the first time in years and it took about 10 seconds to load the level. Also as I was saying the game itself plays a little choppy when in the level too on the new xbox. Something is definitely wrong. A unmodded xbox only takes about a minute to load a level. My "old" modded one can do it in 10 seconds. This new one is taking 5 minutes.
This is the same hard drive I believe:
http://www.buyaae.com/Hitachi-HDS724040KLA...c4983_a_7c90831

The reason for the 10gb partition is just so that I have a working G partition. I mainly will be using F but wanted a minor amount of space on G so when updating things like XBMC I can put a backup copy on G and not get confused as to which things are which. So it is mainly my like a temp drive for myself. Or a manual wastebasket.

[Heimdall]

Or a manual wastebasket.

Thinking about it, you're probably right. 5 Minutes is a bit too long - mine takes what feels like an age, but is probably only around a minute. The only thing I can suggest is that you check the jumpers on the drive (master / slave / CS, and sometimes there's one about LBA48 or emulating different drive layouts). Essentially, you're now down to trial and error on jumper settings, or try a different cable, or reformat the drive in your PC, scan for errors, look at the SMART statistics, to see if there's anything fundamentally wrong with the drive.

[JonnieMazda]

Well after trying out different jumpers and whatnot I still couldn't get it to load faster. I found the solution that worked for me was to buy another drive, format it and replace this one. Success! This new drive is working and Halo and other games are loading/playing at full speed now.

Thanks for the advice!