Ok so I was doing the hd swap, I had to do it a few times and everything was going well but i broke off 2 pins off the hard drive and not my xbox wont work. I am soooooo pissed this is the last time i try to do something I have a 20 gigger from my compaq and i read the tutorial but do u need the stock hd to do it. Oh yeah and I have a backed up image of my hd if that helps

From what I understand about HDD replacement which is limited as im fairly new to this stuff yet but from what i've been reading you should be able to use slayers auto installer to format the HDD but depending on weither or not you will be using xbox live you would need to find out if this drive is lockable or not.

Well I have semi good news, i took the hd out and managed to bend the pins back and plugged it in and there is a CD in. I turn it on the hd soounds like its loading as does the dvd and the ms xbox logo comes on than the service required screen comes on and the red light blinks? Before it did it like 5 seconds after u turned on the xbox so i guess its getting better?

plzzz help

Do you mean you broke the pins off while hotswapping? Or by trying to replace the stock drive with a larger one on an already modded xbox. What service number do you get on the error screen? If your xbox is unmodded then the error is probably because you can't use a Slayers cd in an unmodded box.

I bent a pin while hot swapping, its fixed now but im getting error 21 how do i get it unlocked from here?

first off make damn sure that you have the pins bent correctly back into place you risk hurting your controller which is unrepairable. try this first ... can you put the STOCK HD back into the xbox and boot up? do you ahve a modded xbox? do you have a Softmod/chip/TSOP ? if the answer is NO then you cant put a harddrive in your xbox in the first place ... so put the orginal back in and then learn to mod your xbox. if the answer is yes i have a modded xbox then you need to get a slayer CD and set up the drive.

It is totally stock, and its getting error 21 with stock hard drive.

You get error 21 because Slayers is unsigned code and you have an unmodded xbox. You need to put your original hdd back in and hotswap it into xboxhdm where you add the files needed for a softmod like UDE. Once you get evox running through UDE you can backup your eeprom. With your eeprom data you can then consider upgrading the hdd.

I dont have slayers cd! And I cant swap because I get error 21 WITH the stock hard drive and no cd in it! Unless theres a way to unlock it?

If you get error 21 without a CD on a stock hdd then you must have tampered with the files before. You can still hotswap it just before the error screen pops up. The easiest fix is probably to install UDE on it. Good luck.

fixed

What was the problem?

make sure that you post how you did something ... your break is someone elses fix... if you just say it worked no one gains the how-to in the future.

I just needed to unlock the hard drive from the bootup screen than restored the backup image.