Well, with all the mods for the 360 now, I'm sure it wouldn't be impossible to get backups and homebrew to load straight off the xbox's own drive or, using some of the methods around, an external USB hard drive. You would of course still probably need a disk in the DVD drive to access this normally inaccessible data. Just wondering, since I have just started taking more interest in modding for the 360 (now that I have one).

i don't know if people are working on it, but it would fall under the same category of people working on homebrew, the reason we can boot games right now is because they are 1:1 copies booting from the same medium they were copied from. changing the medium would require patching which would break the 1:1 copy which would not allow us to run them..it sucks, but for now, that's what we're stuck with

That depends. If you could find a game (like Oblivion, for example) that uses a lot of downloaded data (Shivering Isles) that data has to be accessed from the drive, as well as a save; Now, yes, patching would be involved for this, but not on the disk. Change the files being accessed rather than trying to make it access something else first. Sort of a forced save game exploit. Could work, but I have no idea how one would go about doing that.

well yeah, but a saved game exploit would be breaking the hypervisor security, which can only be done in the 360's with a specific kernel right now. so yeah, technically anythings possible..but when it'll happen? when will someone break hypervisor's security on all kernels? who knows

If there's one thing I know about hacking is that anything can be done, it just takes time