I am trying to fix a Retail 8gb hdd for a friend. I put it in my chipped xbox and tried to use slayers evox but it wont boot the disk and when I load my Xenium OS and ftp to the xbox it only shows the dvd drive... is this fixable?

Moving to hardware forum.

The drive must be unlocked before it can be accessed in another xbox.

is there a way to unlock it in the old xbox, cuz i cant load any dashboards on it.... retail games will load but the game saves are missing and i cant access the hdd to put a softmod on it

Try searching for "Hotswapping."

i think thats the only way to do it unless you stick a modchip in teh xbox.

id be going down teh modchip path myself, because they are very handy not just for this; its a lot easier; and you also dont have the risk of blowing up both hard drives....