I've checked all the stickies and FAQs to the best of my abilities, but I'm stumped at the moment and don't want to dig myself any deeper into a hole here.

I softmodded my xbox some time ago using the hotswap tutorial at the top of this forum and it worked great. I even did it again after accidentally erasing my dash with no problems. So, when I showed my friend how cool XBMC was, he wanted me to do it for his xbox.

Of course, when I tried it on his it got all fucked up. I followed the tutorial just like before, but when I tried installing the exploit it told me it was out of space. Perhaps he had too much music backed up on his xbox? I tried restoring the C backup and doing it again, but something went wrong. Now when I try to boot up his xbox I get error 16. I'm guessing the ms dash isn't there at all, and when I try to run ndure again it doesn't appear to be able to access the C drive.

That's about as detailed as I can get, honestly I don't really know exactly what happened, except that something went wrong with the ndure script. Most guides tell me to use a slayer's disc to fix it, except of course I don't have a modded xbox. Am I screwed? Is there a way to fix his HD or do I need to buy him a new xbox?

probably explit didnt installed right and its clock looping.. you can keep trying to hotswap ( using the error 12 method).. and reinstall the softmod using option "2".

I'm not sure what the "error 12 method" is, but I did manage to hotswap and unlock the drive again. Unfortunately it's still doing the same thing. When I tried option 2 it says "cannot create directory" and "cannot create file" -- all on the C partition. Is there a chance that it will work if I just keep trying over and over, or do I have any other options?

Thanks for your help.

you can recreate the C drive..after booting xboxhdm type "xboxhd".. this will bring you harddrive creation tool.. use the option that says "create C drive from scratch" ( you need to have clean C drive files in C folder of the cd)

So I need to get the C drive files from the slayer's iso and build a new xboxhdm cd?

you need to get the files from slayers (extracted) and put them in a "C" folder under the installer folder and run the installer, then make the ISO

Ok, so I'm using the "Xboxhdm for Dummies" tutorial and it says "4. copy your xbox's eeprom.bin to linux>eeprom folder". I don't have the xbox's eeprom.bin, does that mean that I can't rebuild the c partition?

No, you just have to hotswap again
but you need to make sure the files are correct first
you must have
C:\bios\bios.xbe
C:\xodash\ernie.xtf
C:\xodash\xbox.xtf
C:\xboxdash.xbe
as a minimum