Ok. I'm trying to get a larger hard drive option working with the 360. I want to start a thread that has ONLY good information from people who know what they are doing. Ive seen quite a few totally retarded posts already.


Please stick to the topic and have some idea of what you are talking about before blabbing a bunch of speculation. Thanks!

On with it!

Here's what I know so far:

SATA 20GB Stock 360 Drive.
The stock drive appears to not have any hardware locking system. The drive is recognized by a PC controller and functions normally.

The filesystem is unknown.. It would be a miracle but not impossible that it is still the old fatx and not encrypted to death (much doubt). I am trying to find a SATA to IDE converter so I can stick the stock 360 drive in a modded xbox. I bought the IDE to SATA.. and that doesnt get my anywhere I wont have the other adapter till later. Anyone else tried this?

Norton Ghost recognizes the 20gb 360 drive but cannot clone or work with the partition.

Replacing the stock 20gb SATA with another larger SATA drive definately does NOT "just" work. I had false hopes that the 360 would format and prepare any new drive.


USB 2.0 Drives
This is at least a bone thrown to us from MS I guess. USB removable devices DO work; though its not the ultimate solution.

FAT32 is recognized by the 360 for USB devices.

I have formatted a IDE drive FAT32 and connected it to the 360 with a USB 2.0 adapter with sucess. Now we just need to know how large of a formatted FAT32 partition it will support.

Windows XP and 2000 only support partitions up to 32GB with FAT32. Not enough.

The maximum FAT32 volume size that Windows 98 can create is 127.53 GB. So if the 360 supports it we could have up to 127GB of our own content.. We will need to have a 98 machine to load anything new to the drive but its a start.

It seems like some partition level encryption going on and it may be a futile effort to try to replace the stock drive with a larger drive.. at least without paying MS some rediculous dollar per megabyte. Then we still wont have the ability to load our own content to it. If MS was smart they would enable copying to the local drive and sell me a 400GB drive for some retarded price that I would actually pay if I could get MY data on it.

Well Im off to try more stuff. I just wanted to get this thread started. If you have any info, ideas or suggestions please speak up. The 360 is cool and all but IMO we need OUR content before it lives up to any of my expectations. Streaming is just not good enough.

Hey,

Dump the hard drive image to your computer and see how well it compresses using maximum compression level.

As far as writing support for Xbox 360 hard drives, we'll first need to know if any encryption/compression is being used. Grab the listing of files on the Xbox 360 hard drive (or maybe it was a DVD disc, I haven't been able to relocate it, I know it was posted on Xbox-scene at one point) posted on the web some time ago. See if you can locate any entries using a hex editing app.


Windows XP can read and write to FAT32 partitions over 32GB, it just can't natively format the paritions over 32 GB in size. I'd say try a program like PartitionMagic and see how that works out.


http://www.MS.com/resources/documen...kc_fil_tdrn.asp
(duh) Change MS.com to Micro$oft.com -- Xbox-scene replaces micro$oft with ms

So that means I can use my PNY flash drives and shit? I'm guessing that means I can use an external drive too? Don't have my 360 yet, so I can't really test it, ha.

What about trying to load the hdd up in linux with a pc and use the fatx drivers from one of the linux ports to see if is even fatx.

I know this a crazy idea but give them a try. Take a 60gb ipod into the usb then try uploading a game. Another one I thought of was maybe you could try uploading a game from a modded xbox into 360.

ok i do have a 40gb segate usb drive... i got it at wal-mart, if this helps anyone out with what it looks like...

i do not have a 360... yet to try a bunch of stuff, a friend of mine has a core. Suck but at least its a start...

try this... i guess at xbox.com there is an executible that you can dl and burn to a disk to get the backwards compadibility of the orig xbox games...

i put this .xex file on my 512mb usb drive and have not had the ability to try it, need to go to my buddys house...

i wonder if you can load this .xex file from a usb divice... or if M$ has it setup to only load .xex files from the dvd drive...

if you are able to dl this file and do a basic data disk to burn this and your xbox 360 can read it... this lets me know that the fileing sstem cant be all that different from a xp pc..

the 360 will only read mp3 and pictures off USB devices connected to it, everything else is simply ignored.

so perhaps we need a modified mp3 file oder picture to force the xbox to

crash...


@ arakon grützi alter evo-x ler

If the Xbox 360 only looks at the file extention then maybe you can just rename your files to .mp3 or .jpg or something and then copy it over and rename it once it is copied. works for e-mail blockers, why not this? Just a suggestion. I have don't have one yet eiter so I can't test. Any shouldn't linux be able to autodetect how the HD is formatted? Unless M$ did something new. And can you rename files on the Xbox after we get them on there. Is there any FTP ability yet? Does the Xbox allow you to move or rename files once they are on the drive?? Can't wait to get my own so I can play with it. Hope this helps!

Does anyone know if the hard drive in the 360 is specially manufactured for MS or if its just a standard SATA laptop hard drive??

If its a standard one we could buy the same hard drive in stores and swap the boards on the hard drive and then use the 360's hard drive in our pc and view whats on it. Then we should be able to see whats on it. From there we can try to make minor modifications and see if we can "confuse" the X360.

Just a thought!

BlueCELL

Alright. Since there is a core system and a premium system... that means that originally... the hard drive is not locked to the xbox. So that leaves only a few possibilities.
1. all hard drives are locked with a generic "xbox" key... which would mean all are interchangeable... which would be a good move for MS in the way of repairs...(a person can get a new hard drive instead of going to service center).
2. all hard drives are unlocked until attached... once attached they lock to a specific xbox. this should be no problem since there is no dashboard on the hard drive(or else the core system would not work).
3. all hard drives are completely unlocked(slim chance).

so... if there are 2 brave soles with premiums... try swapping one of the hard drives.... if it works... then theory 1 is correct!

wow. i do not understand much of this. all i want to know is can i use a thumb drive in place of a mem card?

You can use a Serial ATA to IDE Cable Converter: http://www.crazypc.com/Merchant2/merchant....oduct_Code=9210

I was thinking about the thumb drive to, could you rename the files on the thumb drive to a .XBE. See if it reads it as a old game.

You also could try what JBlo said with buring a game like "Halo 2" to it with modded maps. If it reads it then we could put a modded Default.xbe that will crash the OS and install an alternitave dashboard.

I have priemium, and swapted HD's with a friends. It reads it fine.

Try useing a old mod. Like playing 007AUF, Save the game. See where it is saved. And replace it with the modded game save. Put the modded game save on a USB Drive, but name them .mp3, or .jpg, then copy them onto the hard drive, then rename them to there origionals.

Also dose anyone know what the DVD drive is in the 360? Like samsung, or sony.

It's a Hitatchi/LG.

Hahaha! A Sony drive in the Xbox! Now, that would be funny!

It's also something I might expect from MS.

We do know that the hard drives are NOT locked. They work fine in a PC under norton Ghost. We could probably clone them. The DVD drive in mine is a Samsung DVD drive last I checked ... i could be mistaken on that though

Doesn't anybody who has a 360 already know somebody who also has one, so that they could swap drives ? I'd be VERY interested to see if this would work. I don't think it will, because I think that the HD's will be encrypted with keys that are different on every XBOX. However, swapping drives would learn us a lot about this.

onolche just said that he swapped hard drives with a friend and it worked fine. So it has been confirmed.

Wow, that would be great news !

Something else: Since partition magic recognizes the HD, isn't there some software that can read it at low level ? Some tool that could read every bit and make a dump of the HD contents ? I'd really love to know if such dump would contain unencrypted ASCII contents like directory contents etc.

Something like this:
http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/



Can someone try something like this ? It would (hopefully) give us great insight in the filestructure, which could eventually lead to the development of software to read (and write) it on a 'higher' level.

Note: this g4u software creates its own bootdisk, you don't need a specific OS to run it.

this is called "sector copy" and can be done with nearly every imaging programm

like norton ghost etc..

you can try this when starting ghost from cammand line with the switch "IR"

for example ghostPE.exe /IR

Just to let you know... if you can get another SATA laptop drive hooked up, I've noticed theres an option for the 360 to format the HDD.... Also, noticed that at least seven gig is used probabley for emulation of the orignial xbox cache files... at least that would make since, as the X360 is only able to use 13 of the 20 gig on the stock HDD...

i would like to see if the Retail Harddrive has anything at all on it...then we would be able to see if we are able to just plug in a Laptop Drive and go for it.

Itd be nice to see what happens with this how long did it take for the eboots to be cracked for the psp.. im assuming theres a similar structure, SATA hard drive.. this cant be that hard.. Is there any ETA on the bigger drives MS was talking about releasing?

That is simply not true. Like topic starter says:



Most of these 'cloning' programs try to interpret the information on disk somehow and therfore only work with 'supported filesystems'. Topic starter couldn't clone his HD with Northon Ghost, I'm 95% sure that it's possible with this software (only make sure that your hardware is recognized by the bootlloader CD, not every SATA controller is supported for example)

I think someone with a 360 hard drive (I would but no 360 yet ) should connect the drive under Linux, then use: hexdump /dev/{360 drive node} /mnt/{mounted drive}/dump.bin
Then try compressing it, if it's small enough to send over the internet try sending it to me and I'll see what I can make of it.

Not to sound too cocky but I know a lot about filesystems, I fixed a corrupted fatx drive with a hex editor before lol so I might be able to provide insight into the filesystem.

Yea, its doable with a hex editior for sure, but heres the issue we're going to have that we didnt have with xbox's. Drive Cost. 120gb drives are about 200 bucks, as opposed to ATA drives which we can get 300gb for 130 bucks

So, anyone did a HD dump already ? The scene is waiting for it

Good point someone brought up about the fat32 support. It is true that you can only CREATE partitions up to 32GB with XP or 2k but they CAN read and write to larger volumes. Im curious to know if Xp and 2k can read and write to fat32 partitions all the way to 2TB. Or at least 400gb . If this is the case I will have my 400GB drive running on my 360 this weekend.

As far as Ghost goes. Like I said, Ghost DOES recognize the partition, its size and other information so the controller and drive is recognized by ghost. But unfortunately it will not work with the partition.

I am becoming more and more less interested in replacing that actual stock drive that comes with the 360 because of the fact that you cannot get your own content on the thing anyway.. unless you rip your CD's which I will not do out of spite. I think USB drives are going to be my personal method until until we have some means of doing this.

I am going to give g4u a shot here this weekend.. wish me luck. Thank god I have two 360's.. one to mess with and one to play. COD2 is so tight that if I didnt have two I would be playing right now instead of dabbling with the hardware!

That's good news ! Northon probably won't work with the partition because it doesn't understand the disc structure, so you need some other program that really doesn't try to analyse the disk structure (like g4u indeed).


Cool ! I tried booting up the g4u boot disk: on my P4 system it crashes (i really don't know why, but it certainly has problems with some of my hardware), but it boots correctly on my AMD system. Still, it recognizes only a limited set of SATA controllers (promise150 for example), so I hope it works with yours. Would be really cool if someone could upload a zipped version of the dump somewhere.


hehe, but hacking around is SO much more fun Good luck !

We know that files downloaded from Xbox Live are encrypted (sent over normal unencrypted HTTP). Its possible that the hard drive contents is encrypted. Maybe encrypted to the hard drive as well (against its serial and using a public key sceme). This would make using nonMS prepared drives impossible (at least for now).

I think someone should dump the contents of their Xbox 360 hard drive with a hex editor such as WinHex and try copying to a second hard drive (an off the shelf, then try copying to another Xbox 360's hard drive) 1:1. See if the Xbox 360 recognizes it, etc. This will at least give us a bit more insight into what protections they're using.

EDIT: Also if you decide to play with the emulator update file, remember that the file mentions what boot source its suppost to use (...CD-ROM). The file is probabbly signed. So even if the Xbox 360 were to allow you to run an executable from a flash device, it wouldn't launch the update file as it is currently written. Also trying to get that same file to run from the hard drive somewhere would suffer from the same problem.

Also of course, see how well the hard drive dump compresses and see if you can find any file/directory strings

I'm no engineer or software hacker, just laying out what I know ; p

I don't have a 360 to test this with, but I have used a program before called Disk Investigator which will read and display the raw data on a disc. I must note though that I have never tried to read a FatX drive with this.

Hopefully this doesn't sound too dumb, but here goes:

Since there has been mention of USB ports and external drives, and someone actually mentioned getting the games to run off of a HDD via USB as a possibility, why not a USB DVD-ROM or DVD-/+RW drive with an original 360 game as a test?

Don't own one yet, and I never buy first-run things (rule of thumb: wait till the bugs and kinks are worked-out).

Anyway, just a thought.

On another note:

Anyone who has disassembled their 360 will most likely know this. I know that M$ is using laptop drives, but am curious if a normal SATA cable can be manually attached to the controller board inside the 360 with a 3.5" SATA drive of larger sizes and formatted using the format drive option mentioned earlier?

Example:

300GB SATA attached to the controller.

IF this can be done, it wouldn't be too hard for someone with some plastic or other fab experience to create an external case that would allow attaching the drive to the outside of the 360 case using via velcro and some cooling options + sound insulation.

But I am a madman, and again, these are my thoughts...

Nice, can anyone else confirm this?

confirm what? that the "missing" 7Gig is set to the XBOX Emulator? well I really see nothing else it could be, the systems claims system files, def not Dash Files ofcourse, and some simple math here roughly hits 7Gb

Edrive is what 4.7Gb
X, Y & Z are .75Gb each so a 2.25Gb

For emulation Purposes I'm assuming that it had to Dedicate 2.25 for XYZ Drives, but i'm curious did it really need the E Drive dedicated? Has any1 Tryed changing the size of the E Drive on XBOX to see what would happen, i'm assuming either not, or it just did nothing and crashed, I'd be a little annoyed if I had to give up that 4.7Gb for XBOX Emulation if I never planned on Using it, so I'd rather have it Joined together instead of split up. next comes my question to custom soundtracks for XBOX games on the 360, I don't think any of the games i have off the BC list have Soundtrack support, but how did they input that feature? Point is that the 7 Gig area has no other purpose but to be the XBOX Emulator location

That means 7Gb of the drive is in a FatX File system, but the other partition(s) don't have to Follow

Yeah it's kinda silly to include a full sized Edrive, xbox games only need a few megs for TDATA/UDATA. They only start bitching when E gets upwards of 95% full of... unrelated materials?

Just go to your system menu all the way to the right and inspect the storage device options. When you select the HDD, it will ask you if you'd like to format, and I believe erase or some other option... I'm at work right now and can't look

I have been looking over the xbox 360 Hard Drive Hex's and it seems to look like there is 2 partitions, Im guessing one for saves, one for xbox emulation. It makes sence since MS would make there own emulator. Later on if someone got there hands on the sc for the emulator, we could create the ultimate xbox-pc emulator

Someone said that even if we maganaged to crack it, The problem will still be with SATA price, Like i stated in my first post in this fourm, get a converter, Or better yet get one, cut it open, and see if its just a basic re-arangeing of the wires. Im not gunna attempt that yet, I still have a couple more tests to do before I destroy it.

Also the 7 gigs could be used by emulator, xbox live connection info, and something like system information( explanes why when I connected my hard drive to my friends xbox and visa-vesa, 360 made us connect to xbox live to use/see xbox-live marketplace pictures, trailers that we downloaded)

UPDATE::: I got my hands on a SATA Drive and connected it to my xbox, It dose not detect it at all. It could require some files on it... I dont know. So I tried connecting my 360 hard drive to my origional xbox w/ Xcuter-3 and it cannot read it. My guess for this is that M$ got smart and made up something to protect the data from being red. Im getting afree xbox 360 hard drive, so ill see whats on it without connecting it to and xbox 360 (useing PC, then XBOX if no luck). DON'T GIVE UP!!!

The best way to upgrade the hard drive, i think, will be to use the USB MASS STORAGE attempt to deliver a hack, crash the os, then, install another dashboard, then copy the contents of the hard drive to a USB drive, Plug in the USB Drive into a computer, then copying the files to another, larger, harddrive. Then makeing the Partions to look like the origonal 360.

I think the odds are that 360 hdds are locked with a universal key, that is, one that is the same for all.

('M$ would never allow use of unlocked hdds' + 'You can swap your 360's hdd with your friend's = Universal key.)

Unless they're using something other than the normal locking method.

-not good logic in this business - the older the XBOX1, no, the older the console, the easier it is to hack. The price, however...

, the 360 hdd doesn't have to have any FATX at all, the emulator will be running on the XBOX360 OS which will have an API for whatever filesystem they're using now.

, you wired it up to a SATA-IDE converter, I presume.
___

The 360 loads its dashboard from something other than the hard-drive, of this we are sure are there doesn't have to be a hard-drive for it to boot to dashboard.

M$ learned a while ago that releasing hardware with flashable BIOSs is a bad idea (1.6, anyone?). I'm betting that this time round M$ will have spent some time making this impossible for the 360. So to modify the dashboard a replacement BIOS will be needed --> modchip. (No softmods.) I think I read somewhere that the dashboard is loaded from the CPUs somehow, in which case we're pwned as far as getting the thing to load straight into...Evox360, is concerned.

As for 360 hard-drives, has anyone yet cloned one to another hard-drive (both of them official XBOX360 drives) and tried that in the console?

It's already been stated many times that the hard drive is completely unlocked. It works just like it should when plugged in to a PC, but we don't know the filesystem yet.

There'd be no point to a universal key. Sure, most users don't have the technology to extract the key, but if it's universal it only takes one person to break it, and the Xbox has proven how many people have how much tech at their disposal.

edit: If anyone has dumped the contents of their drive, please get ahold of me. I can't afford to buy a 360 right now due to car-related expenses, but I want to investigate the drive's format. I'd like to have at least two drive images from different boxes, preferably without saves on them, but I'm not picky.

ok i am definitly not a specialist neither got a x360 but just got an idea...
assuming the file system only store meta-data on the beginning of the drive (most FS that M$ use does... i think) by the fact that the partion table seem to be pretty standard (if pc software can read it it should be ) it should be possible to modifie it in order to reflect the geometrie of a new drive (a larger one) just by changing the sector begining/end; number...
here what i suggest... copy raw data of the drive of a x360 using dd under linux for example... the write it on another drive.... then use cfdisk of fdisk for changing the partion range of the lastest partion on the drive ...
this technic (if it work ) will be highly risky ... and seema bit useless as someone said it is allready possible to format a drive on a xbox 360...
sorry for my poor english and keep going guy...

I have the tiger development osX running on my intel box. do you think we would get any different results hooking up the sata hard drive to that? has anyone tried it?

I have a premium to work with, i just don't want to waste time if it's already been tried so i can move on.

if u plug into a pc can u add files?

No. Nobody yet understands the filestructure. But what you CAN do is make a HD dump, zip it, upload it somewhere, so also people that still don't have a 360 can start analyzing it After we understand the filestructure we can build software to read/write files to the disc with a PC and hopefully replace the drive with a bigger one.

It's possible the Xbox 360 reads out an unique key from the Harddisk flash or eeprom (since the HD isn't a retail disk from Samsung). That way you could swap you HD with other Xboxes, but don't connect a cheap HD from yourself. And it would even be very difficult to crack (just as difficult as making a normal dvd-drive read xbox dvd's).

Much progress has been made. Ppl have succesfully dumped their HD's and started analyzing it. It seems that the format of the drive is some NTFS like, since there have been found NTFS headers at the end of the harddisk images. Therefore, there is some speculation going on that the new filesystem might be the one that's supposedly going to be used in the new windows version, Vista.

Read more about it on wiki:
http://www.free60.org/wiki/Harddrive

To add a new HD to the XBOX and enable the XBOX to format it, the correct headers at the bottom of the Hdd have to be set. After that is picked up, the xbox allows you to format it.

Also, on the dirs of the 360:

Media_Live
Media_L
Music_S
Video_s
Sys_Games_b

_b = basic storage
_L = live market place data
_S= system use folders

hmm. I just thought of this. Could the locking key be inside the CPU with the boot rom? That way you can use that particular hard drive on any other or something like that. That is something to think about if the drives are not locked but are lockable.

Also has anybody tried going into DOS or Linux version DOS and tried see what they can find? I know it sounds crazy but I have heard of people say that you can recover anything if you know what you are doing. And it seems that the drive connects without much difficulty to the PC.

Just a thought.

holy crap sorry when I was replying it was different :|. Sorry that is awesome! ppl are already finding stuff.

Step 1 completed

I was hoping for an NTFS based system, so yay! As for the Vista Filesystem (WINFS) it was dropped some 1 or 2 years ago.

I think they are still gona use winfs its just not gona be used when vista first comes out. I may be wrong... will look for where I saw that.

Input fits any HD and Xbox will Format Any Kind So is it pos. To Mod With A HD oR Have A 250GB And Be Supported, Only Thing is it wont fit in the case,

Look in the pictures Couldnt You Just Hook Up ANy HD bc of the REG SERIAL CABLE? aND there not be a need for special files or anything due to under the options you can format a new hdd under system settings





CracK The BoX


XBOX 360 LIVE NAME: mafiafan123 , contact me if you have any ideas