hey guys, first post here. I'm not new to modding, so I do know a little bit...

info: (not 100% positive on info, Its been a while)

-Xbox v1.0 or v1.1 (not 100% sure, its an early one anyways... i can check later if required)
-Xecuter 2.3b lite and xecuter bios (again, not sure on version)
added -Hyperdrive DVD drive (plays all discs)
-UnleashX v39
-I have a slayers 2.6 disc...
-I know how to ftp and put new programs on evox/unleashx

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I recently played my old xbox for the first time in a long time... and I got thinking about getting a larger harddrive.

It seems that my upgraded DVD drive might be dying on me. ( I think its called Hyperdrive )
The drive has to "load" during games and it also gets jammed when I hit the eject button.
example: morrowind when unequipping / equipping items, it will freeze for a few seconds.

So, basically I want to put a larger HDD in, to backup my games and have space for emulators and music, so I don't have to deal with the DVD drive as much. It would also allow me to get rid of a ton of game dvds laying around on my shelves.

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I would prefer to use a SATA just for how cheap it is...
added: If IDE would be easiest and quickest ( twice the price) I will go this way, btw is EIDE the same as IDE?

I've done a lot of searching, and most of the things I come across are from 2005-2009. I'm not sure if there is more up-to-date programs/ ways to do things...

-Is there an easy and safe way to do SATA, or just go with IDE? (SATA drive would likely be 500gb, IDE would be 250-300gb)

-I've read that Slayers evox cd has a way to format a harddrive? (I have Slayers 2.6)
-Chimp's method (sounds like one of the easier ways)
-XboxHDM (I dont think my pc has IDE, and I heard you could "brick" your PC if done wrong)


Even a point in the right direction would be helpful!

If more info is needed, just ask!



Thanks

Yes IDE will be the easiest. The hard part about using sata is finding an adapter and drive combination that works. Since your box is chipped you'll run into less issues as you don't have to worry about locking the drive.

As for price your best bet for IDE is to get a WD500AAKB 500gb hard which will run about $90 with tax and shipping where as a nice 1tb sata can be had for $70 with tax and shipping plus $10 for the adapter.

Using your computer to write to the drive should present no chance of harm. You only chance harming your computer if you're hotswapping the drive.

Thanks for the quick reply... Is EIDE the same as IDE? or would it work the same way?


So, lets say I go with the IDE, and even a 200gb would hold maybe 50+ xbox games... that would be like 70$ cdn


anyways...

what is the easiest way to install an IDE drive to the xbox?

-chimp's
-slayer's
-XboxHDM (probably out of the question, unless its the only way, not sure if my pc has IDE)

EIDE is basicly an enhanced IDE protocol which adds a few new features so it should work just fine. As for installation I can only talk from experience about using xboxhdm I usually just dig up a P3 machine from my closet. I've also only done upgrades for softmodded boxes which is the reason I use xboxhdm. From what I've read though slayers will be the easiest but chimp can allow you to clone files from the old drive.

@Jordan31---- you have everything that is needed to do the hard drive upgrade accept for the hard drive. You will NOT need to use xboxhdm to setup the drive, your Slayers Disc will do it for you (might want to upgrade to Slayers 2.7 first). IDE drive would be the best route to go so you dont have to mess with the SATA adpaters.

The only other thing you might look into would be finding out what BIOS you have current on your chip. This matters as some bios's dont like hard drives that are over 137GB's. IF your bios supports drives larger than 137GB's you'll be just fine. If not then you'll have to re-flash your modchip with a bios like X2_5035. Since you said in your post you have an Xecture bios you will probably be just fine and will NOT have to upgrade the bios.

Once you've got the hard drive all you need to do is swap it with the old one, insert your slayers disc and reboot the machine. The xbox should load up the slayers disc and just follow the steps to setup the new hard drive (large hard drive option). If you get a hard drive that is 320GB or bigger you will have a few extra steps to take to make sure it is setup properly but that's it.

Oh and installing the new IDE drive is very easy, just take apart the case of the xbox, remove the old hard drive from the caddy (4 screws), replace it with the new one and your all good to go, very easy to do. What ever hard drive you do buy make sure the jumper is set to Cable Select when you install it.

Hope this helps you a bit,

Cheers,
Nextelhalo

Thanks for the info guys...


I forget how to check what bios I have, and how to re-flash...
Is there a chart of xecuter bios' that may tell me?


My other question is if the process is the same with 1.6+ xboxes?
anything else I should know?

this second xbox has the evox m8 bios..


Basically Im looking at
2 xboxes, one is a 1.0 or 1.1, and the other is a 1.6+
- western digital IDE 160gb or 250gb or 320gb
- Slayers or Chimps (im going to research Chimps method)

thanks again

You can check the bios with a program called Bioschecker (lol) but you can also look at in XBMC.
If your in XBMC (latest build possible) got to the System Info page and under the "hardware" section there
should be information about the "detected BIOS". That should give you something to work with there.

Reflashing the chip should be pretty straight forward to do, Heimdall's Hexen disc
or slayers disc should be able to do it for you. If you have an Xecuter 2.3b you'll need
to make sure the flash protect is OFF.

The process is different for 1.6 Xbox's as far as chip installation goes.
You'll have to solder on a little PCB to the bottom of the motherboard
to re-activate the LPC pin holes. There is also certain bios' that work
for 1.6 only so you'll need to aquire that before modding the 1.6.
But just to be clear, are we mainly talking about modding your 1.0-1.1 xbox?

Recommendations- Stick with the 250GB hard drives so you dont have to do any special formatting of the disk, and use Slayers Disc or Hexen (great new utility).

hi jordan31
there maybe another choice
as i mainly use the xbox as DBMS media center,
I brought a dlink dns-313 home nas storage, it has LAN and usb2.0 and the data storage partition is ntfs
So I got a flexible setup, and no need to struggle with outdated and expensive ide hdds or compatibility over sat a-ide adaptive
1.I can use modern sat a drivers with virtually no compatiblity issues up to 2TB, the current drive I'm using is a 500GB debate one
2.the data can be accessed by different xboxs and pcs as long as they are connected to the router via LAN or wifi
3.USB 2.0 and ntfs partition allowed easy media accessibility from my laptop when I want to directly copy files to the disk
Ps: xbmc can use samba share to read from the disk, as other pcs can read/write the data over local network using the same protocol
Similar products maybe available
Hope this helps

redpacman, You lost me, several times on that last post... DBMS? samba?

I am going for the IDE drives, sounds simple and its all I need.... but thanks for the suggestion



nextelhalo, sorry for any confusion, I have 2 xboxes, one is a 1.0 and the other is a 1.6+, BOTH already chipped from a few years back (xecuter 2.3b lite on the 1.0) (xecuter 2.6 on the 1.6+) . The 1.0 is the one that I am not sure of the bios (the x on startup is blue.. haha probably no help at all). The 1.6+ has an evox m8 bios. And I want to put 320gb in each xbox.

dashboards:(I switched from evoutionx to unleashx on the 1.0 the other day, and the 1.6 has evox still)

I have some programs on both xboxes that came with slayer 2.6, so one is a bios checker. It says unkown for bios and mod chip (on the 1.0)


So.. really all I need to know, at this point, is if using slayers to format and install the new drives works exactly the same way on the 1.0 and the 1.6. Is there anything else required to use all 320gb?

Thanks

Slayers will work just fine on both of the xbox's. Since you've been chipped and the correct bios has been installed on both xbox's you'll be just fine there.

Ok here is the deal with 320GB's or higher on hard drives. You'll need to get an app called Xbpartitioner 1.1 to setup these drives. I'm sure when you setup the drive initially with the Slayers disc you have a big fat F partition, probably upwards of 250GB's. When you have a partition that is 250GB's or higher you'll need to format it with 32k clusters using XBpartitioner. If you do not do this correctly you'll have data corruption once you've transferred 250gb's or more over to the xbox and everything you just spent hours transferring will be lost.

Here is how i do it in steps:

1. install the hard drive into the xbox
2. boot up the slayers disc and setup the hard drive
3. Once that is done FTP Xbpartitioner into the E drive.
4. Launch XBpartitioner and format the F drive in 32k clusters.
5. Now your done, just transfer everything over to F without any issues.
6. NOTE: the only problem you may run into would Xmugen
It does not like custom partitions like this, that's the only game I know of
that would give you any problems.
7. ENJOY!!!!!!

Thanks for the help,
that leaves me with one last thing to do, and that is to get the harddrives.

It'll probably be almost a week before they get here, but I'll give you an update if you want, or ask more questions.. hah



A little off topic:

Which bios do you recommend for the xecuter 2.3b lite on a 1.0? IGR doesnt work with unleashx

and the 1.6 has evox M8, and resets when you hit the eject button... any Ideas?

For the 1.0 you can use the X2_5035_512k bios. Your 1.0 has 1MB onboard bios but since your bypassing that with a mod chip you can use a 512k sized bios.

For the 1.6 Evox M8 is just fine. Even though it does the reset on eject it's a small price to pay for not having to mess with the bios and having a good solid bios already.

Give us and update when you get those drives in.

Nextelhalo

Ok, I have a little bit of an update... and some more questions

-I ordered 2 WD 320gb drives, 65$ CDN each, not bad...


I want to get both xboxes ready before the HDD's come in by putting the X2_5035 bios on both the 1.0 and the 1.6+ and UnleashX on both aswell if this matters

I downloaded these bios', but at the same time, I've also read up on different versions...

I do have these on my pc
-x2_5035_vOLD_512k .........for 1.0 - 1.5
-x2_5035_v16plus_512k ... obviously for 1.6+

thats all fine, but I also came across x2.5035.06 and x2.5035.67 on torrent sites/ google searches.
This is what confuses me. (do I ignore this and use the bios' above that I already have?)

Do I have to Edit anything on the files that I do have? or just toss em' on and everything should work?

and when I do decide to install the bios', when I use the X2 Bios Manager, I put the new bios in "slot" 1 and 2 to overwrite the old bios. Do I leave "slot" 3 and 4 blank, to save cromwell from being overwritten?



Thanks so much, I'd probably be like a week or two behind on my reasearch if you werent helping me...

The two bios's will be all that you need to have to get those xbox's all ready to go.
Those bios's on torrent, forget about them, you have what you need.....for the most part.

There will some Bios tweaking needed, you can use EVOX to flash both of those modchips
very easily. Sending you a PM.

PM sent. don't know if it went through though.. let me know

Ok, so I ended up getting x2ool and x2config maker on this website...

that was easy, But Do I want the LBA48 patch? I would prefer if all the new space ended up in one place. Is this doable or do I have to worry about this 137gb I keep hearing about?

I have it set for default which is F: gets all...

X2.5035 has LBA48 enabled by default. The 137GB limit, and the F/G issue, are no longer relevant. When you format your new drive with XBPartitioner 1.1 you select the disk layout you want, and XBPartitioner 1.1 writes the partition table to the disk as it does the formatting. X2.5035 then reads the partition table from the disk when it boots.

You only need to worry about the F/G bit of the BIOS if you are using a drive that was formatted with an old tool that doesn't write the on-disk partition table - but if you use one of those tools then you can't use a disk with partitions larger than 256GB.

Short version: flash the BIOS, use XBPartitioner 1.1 to format the disk (HeXEn does this for you when it builds the disk and installs the dash, Slayers etc. don't).

Ok, thanks.

Update:

I flashed my bios with the evox program Nextelhalo led me to, and it already had bios' in one of the folders. So, I assume the original unmodified bios has the large F: by default.
(the evox program was a lot easier than I thought it would be, I really just wanted to use cromwell because I knew that worked)

My bios is flashed, on both xboxes, I made custom Flubber and X screens, and now my IGR works. Have yet to test the reset on eject on the 1.6.

I want to thank everyone, especially Nextelhalo.

Now for the harddrive, I'm guessing It will arrive monday or tuesday...

UPDATE

Drives came yesterday, but I was at work when they arrived, had to have them leave the package at the door today...

I am currently almost done the 1.0 xbox.

-I used Slayers 2.7 to do a fresh install with larger HDD option.

-FTP'd xbpartitioner 1.1 over to E drive

-Launched the program... I'm not sure if I am done, seemed too quick and easy..

So, I ran xbpartitioner, found partition 6 which is F drive ( I hope... it was ~300gb )
There were 3 options to choose from, I hit start when the option was 'Format'
-format
-write table
-write table and format

Did I pick the correct one? help?

Check the cluster size - see the link in my signature.

Sounds like you got it done, but do what Heimdall says and check the cluster size first before you start transferring all your data.

I sent over a notepad document with a '2' written in it, and that was 1 byte.

I the F drive on both boxes was:
312.030.658.560
and with that 1 byte file, is now:
312.030.625.792

I took the '625' from the original '658' and ended up with 33. Does this sound right, with my notepad document probably not being exactly 1 byte?

thanks for the help



and 1 more thing...
Is having X, Y, and X partitions normal? they have 786 mb each on them...

Yes, and yes.

the cluster size seems fine to me. and im assuming you just messed up the partitions letters in your additional question.and mean x y and z. these are normal.


-=Edit=- i went to check partition sizes on the partitions and hit send and i was out posted -=edit=-

Awesome!

shambles1980: yes, I did mean X, Y, Z

Thank you Nextelhalo and Heimdall, theres not a lot of people who would help someone with something that is as old as the xbox. (on most other forums anyway)