Hello again.

I recently tried, unsuccessfully, to upgrade my Xbox's HDD using the HeXen boot disc. It's possibly because the HDD isn't compatible, but I can't tell without some type of output.

I was wondering if there was a more transparent way to upgrade a soft modded Xbox hard drive.

Even if it involves hot-swapping the drive again, I suppose I'll have to live with it. I ask because I'm not quite sure what the latest technique was (HeXen excluded). I need something transparent, verbose, visual, where I can see what's happening.

All the methods are listed in the link in my signature. HeXEn inplements lxhdm, and it doesn't give you "no output", it shows you what it's doing on the screen in so far as it is possible. How far did it get, what was the last message on the screen etc?

Well... where I was supposed to recieve an error #5, I got an error #9.

I decided to go ahead with the preparation step, which is where the system freezes with the alternate colored flashing light.

At no point though did I see any on-screen text, besides the instruction boxes that I read through.

Okay.

I've moved on to trying out the Ndure+Xboxhdm method.

I prepared a 2GB USB drive, formatted it, installed syslinux+grub4dos, and copied over the ndure installer folder.

I then used the NDTS to FTP my C & E drives to the USB stick, booted into the PC with the target HDD, ran the 'ls -l dev/disk/by-id' command to identify the target HDD (USB drive showed as primary master), started the 'xboxhd2' script, selected primary slave (identified earlier with the 'ls' given command), started the 'xboxhd' script in QEMU, selected the /dev/hda1 drive, confirmed at the 'eeprom.bin prompt, and confirmed at the copy 'C' files prompt.

After about 3 1/2 hours this PC is still running with no results yet. The CLI process manger 'top' shows qemu as taking up 90-99% of the CPU time, with about a 150MB of RAM in use.

How much longer should I wait before I accept it has hung/frozen?

Xbox Error Codes

Error 9 = try a new disk

Thanks for the link.

But... I figured it out.

The hard-drive I was attempting wasn't on the now seriously out-dated compatibility list, but I kept trying anyways. Different PC's, different boot medium (USB/DVD), etc...

I overlooked something very simple, but apparently was required for this to work.

A JUMPER PIN. I hadn't placed a master/slave jumper pin on the hard-drive, which I placed in the cable select position.

Problem Solved.