I upgraded my harddrive this weekend, and hit a few stumbling blocks along the way. i just wanted to share my experiences with all of you, so that the information would be centralized and will hopefully help others in the future.


Guide

for starters, here is an EXCELLENT guide that lays out the basics
http://forums.xbox-scene.com/index.php?showtopic=660096

Making the bootable thumbdrive

the guide talks about using a floppy, and as many computers don't have those anymore, i figure i'll mention that i personally used my thumbdrive that iprep configured for me, and just put the hddhackr tool on that. i then said no at the "do you agree to the terms" screen to get dropped to dos.

if that doesn't work for you, try this link that loggan26 found.
http://csd.dficlub.org/forum/showthread.php?t=1136

Why isn't hddhackr finding my harddrive?

when i went to use hddhackr, i quickly found that the program picked up my ide harddrives (2 western digitals and a seagate), but it didn't pick up my 360 drive. upon reading the read me that came with the tool, i found the following



this is very useful information, and it solved my problem. the I/O port info that you are seeing in that description can be obtained by choosing start -> run, and typing in msinfo32.exe . when you find your sata card, the lines you are typically looking for will be the first and 3rd i/o port line. (the important thing is the difference of 7 that the specialist mentions). once i overwrote the MPRT section in a hex editor, my harddrive was detected and flashed perfectly.

small tip for after the flash

i noticed that after formatting the drive in the 360, if i popped it right in my computer, xplorer only showed partition 1, instead of 0,2 and 3. when i formatted the drive in my 360, then made a new offline profile, the problem was alleviated.

moral of the story: make an offline profile after your format

complications with games

this is the part that kind of sucks, because it shouldn't be necessary. some developers put special protection on their gamesaves to make it difficult to copy. some games have potential workarounds to get the data onto your new harddrive. i'm going to start a list of games that lock the saves, and in cases where a workaround has been found, i'll put it

locked games, no solution
Dead or Alive 4
Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball 2
Viva Pinata
Perfect Dark Zero
The Last Remnant

locked games, solution found

Fable 2
same fix as rockband 1

Rockband
if you copy the data from one harddrive to another, the data won't load. it complains of an unknown error. fortunately, from the dashboard, you have the option to move the rockband save data to a memory card. you MUST choose move, and not copy, otherwise it will give you an error and refuse to transfer.

Rockband 2
same fix as rockband 1

My movie won't play


Solution:




If anyone has anything they would like to add to this thread, just let me know and i'll incorporate it in.

Reaper how did you transfer your saves etc etc from your 20gb backup image or individually saves partitions to the 120gb.
when i do this everything goes ok but when putting the 120gb back into the 360 the xbox only see's , well various free space. 14gb free,, 30gb free, 11gb free, 7gb free.
its all over the place.

the only step i did not do is hexedit the hard drive.
i have not done this because i do not recall doing this on the last 2 drives i had done, but maybe i did.

do you HAVE to hexedit the drive in order to make it work properly ?

thanks in advance !

yeah kinda the same as above,

is there any necessary hex editing needed to transfer saved data for offical 20gig to homemade 120gig.
If so i realllly wanna keep it minimal, i mess stuff up a lot in hex

anyways thanks man

Same problem here. The saves won't be recognized, so i have to start all over again!

i did NOT hex edit the drive. the only thing i had to hex edit was hddhackr (to make it recognize my sata controller.

i used xplorer (xtreme version) and then navigated to partition 3 on my old harddrive. i think right clicked the content folder, and told it to extract.

after this, i put the content folder on partition 3 on the new harddrive. everything worked fine.

Name NVIDIA nForce Serial ATA Controller
Manufacturer NVIDIA Corporation
Status OK
PNP Device ID PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_03F6&SUBSYS_B0021458&REV_A2\3&2411E6FE&0&40
I/O Port 0x000009F0-0x000009F7
I/O Port 0x00000BF0-0x00000BF3
I/O Port 0x00000970-0x00000977
I/O Port 0x00000B70-0x00000B73
I/O Port 0x0000CC00-0x0000CC0F
Memory Address 0xEC105000-0xEC105FFF
IRQ Channel IRQ 22
Driver c:\windows\system32\drivers\nvstor32.sys (5.10.2600.931, 91.50 KB (93,696 bytes), 23/11/2008 15:40)

Does this mean I put 09 F0 09 70 in the hex editor as the last bytes?

yup. if you can't get it to work, let me know and i'll hex it for you. on your hex editor, you should see MPRT turn into some weird characters

finally, a really helpful thread.
I just ordered my HDD. Now, i was wondering if I can use my MOBO's built it sata ports to flash.

all i know is i have an intel 945G chipset, if that matters.
anyways thanks again

as far as i know, any sata chipset should be fine. if you have any trouble, hex editing the program should resolve it. i flashed mine with a via chipset (onboard chipset for my mobo), and it worked great.

i haven't read ANY posts to date where the problem was the persons chipset.

I think I have it right now, but just a quick question reaper, is it better to unplug all drives before doing the flash or is it possible to keep my drives connected? I have quite a few drives lol...

oh and thanx for the great tut...

My flashing only computer has that chipset (and a via card). The on-board SATA (ICH7) worked fine..

The VIA card could auto dump sectors 16-22 from the 20 gigs with hddhackr. The VIA could dump 16 - 22 from the 120s using a hex editor but the VIA could NOT write the hddss.bins back properly.

if you are using a stock copy of hddhackr, it will ask you which drive to flash, so you should be fine leaving everything hooked up. from what i remember, a hexed copy doesn't ask you which drive, so in this case, i'd say take the extra effort to disconnect all your other sata drives. (this should be simple. you can just pull all the power cables)

Yeah, I just unplugged all my drives just to be extra sure lol. Didnt want to take any chances with my other drives. The firmware installed no probs and im just waiting for my 20gig to get delivered, to get the enclosure, and im good to go. I didnt want to fry my board with my soldering skills.

Thanx again Reaper for all the help.

Just a quick update.......... Got my 20gig today(yay), anyway.... Flashed the WD drive about 2 weeks ago, no problems there (with the help of this tut)......... Opened the enclosure, no problems there (well, nearly lost a spring )........... Swapped out the drives, no problems there.......... Fomatted the drive on XBOX, no problems there (107GB Free)........... Installed a game, no problems there (fixed popup on GTA IV)...........

I would like to thank everyone for thier help and guidance, I followed all the info to the letter and it all went smooth for me.

thanks

So often people will leach information from forums and not give proper thanks for the successes, moreover whining about their own failures. I just wanted to say thanks for the tutorial and info. It worked flawlessly, even on the new dashboard "experience."

I did run into the issue where a downloaded movie wouldn't play because it said something about doesn't recognize that format. I deleted the Rights Database in System Items under Memory in the System Settings blade and immediately played right away.

Also there were was a corrupt Arcade download (which I just re-d/led) and a an incomplete Game Add-On which downloaded just fine also.

Thanks again....good game,
Arimanio

I'm still confused after reading this tut and the other linked one. You dont need a 20gig drive to format a 120 gig right, except to get the plastic enclosure to mount your new 120 gig????

If all you need is the HDDSS.bin file, some guy said that he just got a copy of one from the usual places, and used that instead of getting it from an actual 20 gig he owned.

I am thinking of getting the arcade xbox and just buying a 120 gig and attempt to flash it....and then may be buy a plastic enclosure from ebay.

Would that work?

Also, does XBOX see the 120 gig as 1 big partition or several???

Thanks for the HEX editing info. Never done any of that up till now, but it worked like a charm. Detected my drive right away after I edited the .exe. Flashed the 120 drive with no problems.

I just hesitate because of the RockBand 1/2 save issues, and I also have some Fable 2 saves I hear can have issues after. I'm really hoping I can find someone with a data transfer kit, so I can bypass all the trouble. Actually, now that I think of it I only have one enclosure, so I don't think the transfer cable will work.

If anyone has any info about a fail safe way to transfer all of your info from you 20 gig HD to the new 120 (and hopefully how to not have your 20 gig be unreadable after) I would greatly appreciate it! Not sure if its the hddhackr.exe that is making the 20 gig drives unreadable, or if it's the Xplorer360 program. Hopefully it's the hddhackr. People have been hooking up their old 20 gig drive to do a backup of it as a fix for all the partitions not showing up after a format of the new 120 gig drive. From the OP here it seems creating an offline profile on the new drive resolves that issue without messing around with the old 20 gig backup via hddhackr.

Anyway thanks a ton for the posts! All this info helps a ton. I'll have to go read a bit more before I crack open my 20 gig drive and try to transfer everything over. I have no problem trying this if my old 20 gig drive is still usable after.

BTW...The OP says to fix your RB 1/2 saves just act like you are copying them over to an SD card, but don't actually copy them over. Is that accurate? I've been trying to understand it, but it's kind of vague to me.

Thanks!

that will work fine. the xbox won't show you the partition breakdown, but there will really be 3 partitions there (and you will see 3 partitions from your computer).

the way your describing what you want to do will work fine. just make sure you get an enclosure. (i guess circuit city is having a really good deal on 20 gig harddrives right now, you might want to check that out).





you have to put an official xbox memory card into your system, and then use the move option to move rockband 1/2 saves to the memory card. you MUST use move, and NOT copy. (you'll know the difference when you try, because move will work, and copy will say "this save can't be copied"). once your 120 gig drive is good to go, you can move the save from the memory card to the new drive.

Well I finally did this. Luckily I copy and pasted one of the tutorial posts and mailed it to myself, cause the stupid forum was down the whole time I was trying to do it (which was about 3 hours).
Everything went fine till It was time to copy over partition 3. Stupid NCAA game files kept looping. You'd save yourselves a lot of headaches if you just copy over a folder at a time. i just copied each folder until I got to my game saves, then I copied each sub folder. When I got to the NCAA folder I copied each file and then it worked fine. That took 2 hours to figure out though.

The next problem was not seeing all the partitions on the new 120 gig hard drive. I created an offline profile like the OP stated, but that that didn't work. I had to hex edit line 80000, restore partition 2 (luckily I had backed it up from the original HD), and then all the drives appeared. I did have some garbage listed in partition 1, but I just left it. I was just happy to be done. I had restored the partition 2 manually the first time and jacked up the drive. Had to initialize it in windows and start over.

After that everything copied over fine. I found a 64 gig memory card at play n trade for 20$ on the way home from work. Steep, but it barely held all my files, and Rock Band 1/2 worked fine after the restore. Now I have 99 gigs free and I'm very happy. I appreciate all the help from those who had done it before me. The hex edit was very easy. Just one line to edit, and then restore partition 2. After that all of the partitions appeared.

So total for the drive was 90$ after the MU and the torx set I purchased for 10$. Stupid set still didn't have a true 6T head in it, but one of the 8T worked enough to get them out.

I've known about the WD hack for sometime, but just never got round to buying the drive to do it. I requested a 7200rpm drive for my notebook and when I swapped the drive out I noticed that my old drive was/is actually a Fujitsu MHW2120BH. That's the exact model number that MS uses in the elites. Imagine my dismay when I found out that because of the firmware difference on the drive, I can't actually use it in my xbox. Anybody found a way around that yet?

hi,
can we have a list of hds that work on the 360 please or even a link "if there is any where with the infomation".
thanks

anyone know if I use a USB to SATA kit with power and data cables, will it be able to copy stuff from my old 20gb hard drive to the new 120gb hard drive? Will xplorer360 see my hard drive with this kit?

Also, Reaper did you get stuff off a 20gb to the 120gb if some how did you do it, did you just go by the guide you talked about in the first post?

xplorer360 will see the drives if they are formatted by the xbox and you're using the version of xplorer360 moded by The_specialist

i worked from a 20 gig drive, and pulled it out of its casing and hooked it directly up to my pc. (no adapters). i then put a 120gig drive in my 20 gigs casing.

a usb/sata kit SHOULD work fine, but i didn't personally use one.

Ok cool thanks for the help, right now im waiting for the 120gb to be shipped to me and than im ready to do it, i hope every thing works out and thanks again for the help

One more thing I have been reading things about this hack on the internet and have found a few story of people having problems getting there 360 to read the 20 gb hard drive after this hack, anyone know if this can be fixed or how to stop this from happening? Sorry for asking so many questions it just that I like to know a few things before I start changing things around.

Is it okay if I buy exactly a 120GB Western Digital drive (WD1200BEVS - Scorpio)?
Somewhere else I read the suggestion to use a 160GB... but it really sound no sense to me!
Could you please confirm? Thanks

all i can say is that my 20 gig drive still works fine in my 360 after i did the hack. i used the xtreme version of xplorer and didn't make any modifications to the drive and only read from it.




yes, but sometimes you can get the 160gig drive cheaper than the 120gig drive (as weird as that sounds).

I have searched but am unsure exactly what a "bare drive" is. Would I be able to use a bare drive for this purpose?

can you elaborate a bit more on the topic of making a bootable thumb drive? im very confused

Im I doing something wrong? I formated the 120gb and affer the format a made an offline profile, xplorer only shows partition 1, instead of 0,2 and 3. What can I do?

Also, how long does it take to format? It only took my xbox about 2 to 3 minutes

i have successfully used hddhackr on my 120 gig now my drive wot be detected in explorer

I had to make full image of the 20GB and restore it to my 120GB, and that fixed the problem of only seeing partition 1. Thanks for the guide it helped me out a few times. I now have a 120GB hard drive that works in my 360.

i have apparently done something terrible as my 360 wont recognize my harddrive anymore but when i try to rehddhackr it it says my drive should work with the 360 and i forgot to keep my undo.bin what can i do?

Hey, i was hoping for a little help as i try to rectify my failures.

I used hddhackr, and that worked, popped 120gb into my xbox and that worked, (didnt make a profile like is said in this topic), put 20gb into my computer and into xplorer 360 xtreme batch 2, backed up the entire drive into an image and that worked, then put 120 in and restored entire image onto the drive, and that worked.

well when i plugged the 120 into the xbox, it didnt work. couldnt even recognize it. so im like ok then... and put it back into xplorer to notice any problems. didnt see anything so i went to the forums. Saw that a possible way to start over is to undo the flash to the hard drive, so i load up hddhackr -u and it cant find the hard drive although it was able to before. so i go back into xp and the xplorer 360 program to try to find a format or undo option or something, nothing i could find. so i start deleting the files from the hard drive at an attempt to destroy whatever file is making the xbox not recognize it. done with that, put it into the xbox, not working. put it back into hddhackr one last time, didnt recognize.

So to sum up my problem at the moment: Hddhackr can't recognize my drive, xbox 360 can't recognize my drive, but xplorer can. and windows xp can, i can make the hard drive into a working hard drive on my computer if i wanted to. What i want to do is pretty much just start from scratch, either right when i got the drive or right when hddhackr worked and xbox formatted it.

One thing that came to mind as i was typing this was that my bios reset in the process so im gonna go check on that in the mean time in case an option in there is preventing hddhackr from detecting the drive, but any help is greatly appreciated. I dont think my hard drive is unusable yet and i really hope i can get this working.

Edit: Well, I bought two of these hard drives, so i think im gonna format one and put it in my ps3, and use the untouched one and try once again at this hack.

I used this guide to make my thumb drive bootable. http://csd.dficlub.org/forum/showthread.php?t=1136

Logan

what i did was use windows enabler to format the thumb drive as a dos boot disk through windows

Basically after migrating from 20g to 120g with official MS cable my xbox1 originals became non-working.

The error message was:
"The game could not start. Please download the game again."

MS support could not help me.

All Xplorer360 versions had serious problems with my 120g Elite hdd but I could see that partition2 was missing.

To be short: if you have such problem and want an easy solution:
- get Xplorer360 xtreme2 somewhere
- connect your HDD to the PC
- in Xplorer360 select "restore partition 2" and browse the file I linked .... voila!

partition2 image which contains the 2007-11 xbox1 compatibility update:
CLICK HERE

Hello to everyone!
I've also switched to a WD120BEVS with no issues... just needed to hex edit the drive to get the partitions in place correctly. But that solved the problem easily and the drive is now working perfectly with my Xbox 360.

I'm left with one problem only... when I try to play Fable 2 with my old gamesave, an error message advises that the save data might be corrupted (or something similar).
I read another post in this thread mentioning about possible issues with Fable 2 savegames! (quoted below)

That user (xxzone) also hacked and mounted a WD 120GB drive but then he didn't add any further comments about his Fable 2 saves... is anybody aware of a solution available to preserve the Fable 2 save data? Hopefully xxzone is still reading this post and might provide more infos as well... thanks!

LOL what a coincidence...I don't usually come on here unless I'm going to mod something, but I decided to check up on this post. Lots of people gave to these threads so I could do the upgrade, so I wanted to give back if possible.

The trick to the fable 2 & Rock Band saves is to use a memory card. Right now it's the only way. You have to load up your old 20 gig drive. Put the memory card into your xbox. Browse to your Fable 2 saves and select MOVE. It has to be MOVE or it will not work. This will remove the Fable 2 save from your 20 gig HD and place it on your memory card. You then plug in you 120 gig HD to the xbox once it's all working. Plug in the memory card (it's probably still in there anyway), and then MOVE the save files over to the new hard drive. Once you do this it should work without a problem.

That's the process I followed from the OP in this thread.

that file is damaged

two new mirrors:
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=O8R9UGAP
or
http://www.filedropper.com/120gpartition201_1

MD5 checksum: d8c4d2d6faf73a70ef2f9f318d6ee7dd

as I heard official 60gb hdds get killed by xplorer360 (xtreme2) ... be careful!

Yesterday, I borrowed a Memory Unit from a friend of mine and did exactly as you suggested.
Now Fable 2 can load the gamesave from my 120GB HD without any issues.
Thanks!

I got a few questions I want to ask and if someone could answer me I would greatly appreciate it.

1. Is there a easy way to see if I'm running anything that could interfere with the transfer process to my 120 gb harddrive coming in the mail of my western digital 120 gb evs harddrive coming in the mail. Cause I checked my computer settings and think it is running the nvidia stuff mentioned that could interfere getting it to work, but not 100% sure.. here's what I got..

Under my display adapters: Nvidia GeForce6150 LE
Under Network Adapters: Nvidia nForce Networking controller
Nvidia Network Bus Enumulator
Under System Devices: NForce Hyper Transport Bridge
a Bunch of Nvidia Memory Controllers
and last Nvidia Nforce PCI System management

What exactly do I need if I need it to get my computer to work right with these? I'm just trying to figure out what I need to do before this 120 gb hd I'm getting in the mail gets here.

2. I have a 20 gb harddrive on my 360 that I would love to be able to transfer all my saves and stuff over to this 120 gb after I get it setup.. Is it possible to transfer the stuff from my 20 to the 120 easily? Oh btw I do have certain games that are copy protected from what I heard like Dead or Alive 4 and Ninja Gaiden 2 and wonder if those would transfer fine along with both my rock band save files.


I know I maybe asking alot but I just want to try and figure out what to do before it gets here before I run into some complications is all. I would greatly appreciate some assistance on this. Thanks

If I need to change anything I got two of these and not sure what to change on them on one or both of these:

Name Standard Dual Channel PCI IDE Controller
Manufacturer (Standard IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers)
Status OK
PNP Device ID PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_0266&SUBSYS_2A41103C&REV_A1\3&2411E6FE&0&70
I/O Port 0x000009F0-0x000009F7
I/O Port 0x00000BF0-0x00000BF3
I/O Port 0x00000970-0x00000977
I/O Port 0x00000B70-0x00000B73
I/O Port 0x0000E000-0x0000E00F
Memory Address 0xFE02D000-0xFE02DFFF
IRQ Channel IRQ 22
Driver c:\windows\system32\drivers\pciide.sys (5.1.2600.0 (XPClient.010817-1148), 3.25 KB (3,328 bytes), 8/10/2004 12:00 AM)




Name Standard Dual Channel PCI IDE Controller
Manufacturer (Standard IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers)
Status OK
PNP Device ID PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_0267&SUBSYS_2A41103C&REV_A1\3&2411E6FE&0&78
I/O Port 0x000009E0-0x000009E7
I/O Port 0x00000BE0-0x00000BE3
I/O Port 0x00000960-0x00000967
I/O Port 0x00000B60-0x00000B63
I/O Port 0x0000CC00-0x0000CC0F
Memory Address 0xFE02C000-0xFE02CFFF
IRQ Channel IRQ 23
Driver c:\windows\system32\drivers\pciide.sys (5.1.2600.0 (XPClient.010817-1148), 3.25 KB (3,328 bytes), 8/10/2004 12:00 AM)



My computer has both of these which I think I may need to change but not sure if I need to mess with just the one or both or what.. I'm so very confused on it... along with the stuff I asked previously as well.

Small question....


My current 20GB drive has nothing on it that i need.

So... after i format the new 120GB drive in my 360, will i still need to hook it back up to the PC to move over the partitions or can i just do the recovery for my gamertag/live account and start using the drive right away?

you should be fine to just do the recovery and start loading the new drive with content.

I have 3 set of info. returned, I tried one by one. Indeed, it doesn't hurt you (the HD) if you picked a wrong one, since it's just used for editing the file, hddhackr. Once rebooted and reported that it cannot detect the HD, try another set of info. Mine HD was detected at the 2nd time.