Just Uber

Again, the standard disclaimer. This like any other type of mod can jigger your Xbox!

This time round though the risk is slightly less. If you make a mistake on your new hard drive it’s not the end of the world. You should be able to replace the original drive again as long as you are careful with it!

Oooh, mental note - you might want to revert back to the EvolutionX dash for your backup, rather than the XBMC. It’s not obligatory, it just may give you a bit more backup in case anything goes wrong.

In this the final stage of my Xbox modification project, I’m going to cover removing the existing drive to install a larger (320 GB in my case) hard disk.

To accomplish this we’re going to need to take the backups recovered in the last tutorial and use them to image the larger drive. Once prepared, the existing drive can be removed and the larger one inserted.

First of all, ensure that you have backups of the following.

C: Drive
E: Drive
Eeprom (Specifically the eeprom.bin file)

Unpack the xboxhdm archive referred to in the last tutorial onto your Windows XP desktop. Take the C and E folders and use them to replace the existing C and E folders in the xboxhdm\linux folder. Take the eeprom.bin file and put it into the xboxhdm\linux\eeprom folder.

In the root of the xboxhdm folder, you should find a batch file named make-iso-win. Running it creates an .iso image which you need to burn using your favourite CD burning software. This creates a custom Linux Live CD which will allow you to reimage your larger hard disk drive.

Take any old PC and unplug the IDE cables from the mainboard. Plug the cable into the IDE socket attaching the CDROM as the secondary device and your large hard disk drive as the primary device. In my experience, cable selection often goes wrong; so you might have to fiddle with jumper settings. Check the BIOS to ensure that the devices are set up correctly as the Live CD won’t work if they aren’t.

OK - that out of the way you can now boot from your newly created Linux CD.

1) Select option 1
2) Type xboxhd
3) Choose option 1 again (Build a new Xbox Hard Drive from Scratch) If you get errors at this stage check you setup the CDROM and HDD properly.
4) At this stage the installer should ask you whether or not you want the files from C and E transfering to the drive. You do!
5) When asked if you want to create an F drive, you do too.

Now you have nearly finished creating your new larger hard disk drive.

Reboot the PC, and start from the Linux Live CD again. Type ‘3′ to enter the locking/unlocking utility screen and type ‘lockhd -a’ when presented with the prompt. The hard disk drive will be locked using the code located in the eeprom.bin file you saved on the Live CD. It is now prepared for insertion to the Xbox.

Now simply remove the existing drive and replace with your new larger drive and start up the Xbox. It should now boot up nicely!

If you have selected a very large hard disk, you may not be able to see all of it. This seems to be due to some of the limitations of xboxhdm so you will need to grab a copy of the UnleashX dashboard to reformat the final partitions of the hard disk.

Once you get hold of a copy, FTP it to the Apps folder on your XBox. You can then select it as an application from the currently installed dash - and once you have it running - you’ll find options for reformatting partitions on the hard drive.

Finally, to wind the project up, I thought I’d treat you with some screenshots from the XBox Media Centre (Click to enlarge).

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This entry was posted on Saturday, February 2nd, 2008 at 9:09 pm and is filed under Tags: hardware, XBMC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.