First of all, I actually do think there is a set of bad sectors on this which is why I was trying to mod it so I could get eeprom and throw in a 200gb hard drive I have here. The problem is, xplorer360 thought it would be funny to break my partitions. I have all the partitions except E but I have nothing to restore and my xbox isn't even softmodded yet. Really don't feel like going and buying a soldering iron or an eeprom reader unless I HAVE to. A bit of help would be appreciated.

Other info:

Tried XBHDM 1.9 and 2.2; both didn't fix. *Says it's unlocked and everything so it's not a hotswapping issue.

Have tried searching for a fix but can't seem to find one. When I say searching, I mean I've spent the past 2 days using google and searching this forum.

1. You don't need a soldering iron to build an eeprom reader: http://forums.xbox-scene.com/index.php?showtopic=645714
2. Did you try "Rebuild a new Xbox HD from scratch" option in hdm? The files for E partition for the softmod can be extracted from HeXEn disc.
3. What led to the conclusion there are bad sectors?

1) Thanks.
2) Yeah, it kept saying "Hard drive is not locked but locking is enabled, press any key to exit" and just hung there. I attempted to rewrite the FATX partition table and nothing really worked. :/
3) Tried writing a file to it using the hotswap method and while it worked to a point it kept failing at a certain cluster. I was just preparing files to mod it if I ever got bored. Then I decided since it's a bad cluster (seems to be FATX speak for failing sectors. that I would just mod it.)

How are you doing the hotswapping?