OK.. This is not a duplicate post.

I just need way to find out for sure if my hard drive is dead withot resorting to chipping it or doing a Hot swap or the other things you guys talk about all the time.

The way I understand it after reading through loads of posts is this....

If you have modded your box in any way and get the error 16, it's probably because either, i. You did something wrong when modding 2. You lost your dashboard or it became corrupted in some way.

With either of these is seems easy to cure.

Now, if you have a "virgin" machine unmolested by human hands or software, if you get an error 16 it is probably your hard drive and you will have to get it modded at the very least.

Am I correct with this ? Because I need to know before I proceed to get the xbox modded in some way.

Also if there is no easy way to determine if the drivve is deceased , could someone advise what is the best chip to get in this situation ?

The HDD is not dead unless you get an error 07. Even then, in some rare occasions it can be just a bad IDE cable.

The HDD is not dead unless you get an error 07. Even then, in some rare occasions it can be just a bad IDE cable.

Thanks for the quick response.

I got an error 7 first, then error 13, then error 16 on successive reboots.

Now all I get is error 16.

It still doesn't answer if there is some other check that can be done to tell for sure that it's dead, but I will check the IDE cable and maybe replace with an ATA type. Think I saw how to do that in a tut.

If its booting to a 16, its not dead, a error 07 takes priority and would be displayed first.



The HDD is (P)ATA the cable is IDE, in other words, they are the same thing.

With it booting multiple error code makes me think its dying, but its not dead yet.

But it's now booting to error 16 all the time so I guess that's good news then?

The xbox cable mod was where I got the ATA stuff from . I understood that the xbox IDE cable was different (as is everything else) on the xbox. I read a tutorial about the easiest mod there was and it concerned replacing the xbox IDE cable.

I will try that first and if it doesn't work, then I will research which mod chip to get and bypass the clock security thing.

Shite, this is like learning a different language ! Back to PC games for me I think

A new cable will not fix an error 16, just buy a duox 2 chip, you can pick them up for $15.