Hi, I've got a strange problem and I'm hoping it's something obvious someone can shed some light on. I recently modded a v1.6 by cloning the HDD from a successful v1.6b mod I've been running for a year. I've used this same hard drive to clone both another 1.6 and 1.6b successfully, as well as a number of 1.0-1.5's. I use XBMC as the main dash board, with the config file pointing it to E/XBMC. The softmod loads flawlessly, XBMC, Evox, and UnleashX all load and perform properly, but I cannot load msdash.xbe on this new box. Whenever I select it the box resets into my default dash. I tried uninstalling the softmod on this hard drive and it then went into an endless boot cycle which I assumed may have been a discrepancy between kernel versions and the xboxdash version from the cloned drive. I then FTP'd the contents of its original drive to C, assuming that it would fix the problem, but it went into the boot cycle again. I reverted the C drive back to the cloned contents and it booted fine again, but still no msdash. I re-installed the original HDD to confirm if the contents had been corrupted, but it loaded the stock dash no problem. So I've ruled out kernel issues, as the original version of Xboxdash will not work on the new drive. Could this be a format issue? Here is everything I've already checked or gone through:

-switched jumper settings on new drive (cable, master, slave, open)
-changed IDE cable
-confirmed this version xboxdash works in this xbox on different drive
-tried updating dash with original MS games

More details:

-SID 3.1
-Western Digital WD2500BB 250GB HDD
-ATA 100/133 cable

Before anybody responds by saying "You don't need the xboxdash anyway, you can do it all from XBMC", this dash issue prevents the mod from booting Halo 2, Splinter Cell, and I'm assuming any other games that require the msdash. It's more the point that I would like everything to work the way it should, as I've never come across this problem in my forum searches so I'm hoping it's something really obvious I'm overlooking.

Thanks for any help!!!


p.s. Sorry if this isn't in the right topic category, but it seemed most suited here as a softmod issue.....

Hi again.....just thought I should clarify that the new HDD seems to be performing fine with homebrew software, its just genuine microsoft software that freezes up or won't load. I made sure to change the partition size to utilize all 250 GB and format F to 32K clusters, so the partitions should be ok....... it seems something else on the HDD is registering as foreign on the system.

Thanks again for any help...

So I just found out how much of a n00b I really am......after 3 days of Google I posted this, and on my way out read an unrelated post. Anyway, the solution was game related (I don't really use mine for games, so didn't search that topic) and pretty simple. Delete E:\Cache. I had let it build up during my previous cloning and backup process, and it finally crashed this drive. So el deleto, no more problemo. Sorry to the admin for using space for this topic, I really did search first, I was searching for msdash boot problems though and there is nothing on that...........you can delete this or leave it and let someone else learn from my idiocy. Thanks for the great site!!!