Well i have a new 320gb hard drive i want to put in my xbox, That all ready has a modchip with the XBMC dashboard and the orignal hard drive. I was wondering if their was any way i could just Swap the Hard drive (I only have dial up).

just put in new hard drive and format with xbpartitioner (as with this i "think" you can format the entire drive to use on F instead of the F & G partitions) then boot up a bootable disc like slayers and install dashboard etc then copy in your games etc and thats that i believe

for a 320GB HDD you will have to use F and G. anything over 250GB you will have to use F and G. and since you have 56k you might want to use xboxhdm to format and then FTP everything over. auto installers are kinda big and will take a while to download. just d/l all the apps and homebrew that you want and than FTP it over.

thanks for clearing that up for me as i was always a little hazy on what was the limits of HDD space

you cant have a single partition (C, E,F,G, etc.) over 256GB and if you do you have to format with 32kb clusters.

so in that case was i right in saying you could use the entire 320GB onto F ? ... instead of the F and G partitions.

no. you would then have over 256GB in the F drive. and would result in corruption.

i forgot a little :you cant have a single partition (C, E,F,G, etc.) over 256GB and if you do you have to format with 32kb clusters after you have both F and G

i see what you mean now ... so in other words if i had a 500GB hard drive ... i would still have to have F & G partitions but they would have to BOTH be using 32k cluster sizes in order to avoid curruption.... also how does xbpartitioner partition a 500GB hdd (as i never used it before since i only got a 80GB in my xbox) ... would it do 256GB on F and the rest of the 500GB on G?

this sums it up. we were both right after all. so you can have a single F drive (formatted in 32kb clusters) but if you have F and G you wont have to worry about formatting in 32kb clusters.

i think xbpartitioner does everything automatically according to the size of your HDD. im not sure as well since i have only used xboxhdm.

great, i always thought u could do the entire 500GB on F "IF" using the 32k cluster thing but i was never 100percent sure on it... until now ... and like i said i never really used XBPartitioner (even though i have the app installed on my xbox) as like i said above i only have a 80GB hdd in my xbox right now.

only bad thing about 32k clusers is it can waste more disc space, especially if you got alot of games on there with alot of small files... but i think it would be worth it cause all space would be on F instead of F and G.

it sounds like you guys have already figured it out but i just formatted a 500gb hd the other day for a mod i was doing for a friend. I just used the defaults in xboxhdm and, if i remember correctly (i dont have it anymore), the F partition got maybe 135ish gb while the G partition got about 350gb. hope this helps...

-drum

Drumstyk1 if you didnt use xboxpartioner on the G partition once it gets over 250gb of data on it it will corrupt and you will lose the lot, it may look ok now but until it is formated with 32k clusters its a time bomb waiting to go off.

The limitations stated earlier in this post are correct, a single partition using standard clusters cant exceed 256Mb and retain its integrity.

By default using .67 sets F to 137GB and G takes the rest. That is set in the bios.

Thanks it was late

wow, it sounds like i need to do some more reading. thanks for the tip and i apologize for the misleading info/advice. come to think of it the hd did act funny (denied write permissions after 300gbs or so). I ended up just making a new folder, ftp-ing files there, then it let me move them into the proper folder via the xbmc file explorer. it seems to be working fine atm but i definitely dont want to give my buddy a "timebomb"

-drum