Xbox Hard Drive Upgrade :: Mark Crostons pages

Xbox Hard Drive Upgrade

xbox logo An xbox, unmodded Clear Xbox jewel illuminated by a cathode

I decided my Xbox needed more space. The possibilities of the various media centres and Linux installs cannot be fully exploited without a larger hard drive. The xbox ships with a 8Gb or 10Gb drive. Once the various patitions are in, this leaves you about 5Gb to play with. This is one game or DVD video. Around 4 compressed movies would fit, but an install of GentooX takes 3.5Gb and leaves you with no other space to play with.

Ideally, I want all of my games backed up to the hard drive, a copy of linux to play with, my MP3 collection and Xvid copied of things like my Red Dwarf and Simpsons DVD's. So a bigger Hard Drive is needed! 120Gb seems to be the current best balance on Gb/£.

Its important to be able to lock the hard drive in the xbox so that you can use the MS dashboard and the Xbox live service. There is a great list of lockable drives at Xbox drive lockability site thing. I wanted the drive to run cool and quiet in the Xbox so I went looking for a 5400 RPM drive. Ebuyer had a Western Digital 5400rpm 120Gb drive for £45 inc VAT. This seemed like good value to me and checking the list I found its easlily locakable. Needless to say, I bought one.

Things you need

Before you start, you need a modded Xbox, a lockable HD and a working EvoX boot disc. You can make one of these by making an iso from the evox files. Just edit your evox.ini so that the network settings will let you access the xbox when you boot from it. Burn the ISO to a CDRW and try to boot from it. If it boots, use ftp to connect to it. Once your sure it works, continue.

If it wont boot, remake the ISO with a dummy file or just chuck a 200mb rar on the disc and try again. If it still wont go, try a differnet type of CDRW - i have used 4x Verbatim without any probs. You can download ready made boot ISO's if you like. Sometimes if the CDRW is a little iffy, it will boot after a couple of tries.

Backup

Backup your Data! You will need to do a backup of all the data on your C and E partitions plus all of your EEPROM data.

Use EvoX
In settings, hit backup
Use FTP to copy all the data from C and E off.
Check you have a folder C:Backup with 5 files in

If backup is not an option in EvoX you need to a) get the latest version b) enable it in your EvoX.ini. Download and take the needed bit from the evox.ini which comes with the latest version.

Installation

Installation is not difficult.

Unscrew the 6 bolts holding your xbox together.
Remove the top of the Xbox
Remove IDE and power from HD
Unscrew the single torx screw holding the HD caddy in
Lift out HD caddy and unclip power cable from the caddy
Remove the 4 torx screws holding in the HD
Check your new HD is set to cable select
Screw it in, and put the Xbox back together

Format

You can do this 3 ways:

Use a custom EvoX
Boot EvoX off CDRW and use raw Ftp commands
Use slayers or FIreFu***rs auto instaler

I used the raw commands option. Boot the console from a EvoX CDRW and connect to it using FTP. Issue the following Raw commands:
Formatpath DeviceHarddisk0Partition1
The FTP app will echo a hard drive key. This is a number or alpahnumeric code. Next type
FormatDrive 'key' (no quotes)
You can copy the key in flashFXP by highlighting it and then use Ctrl-V to paste it after the command. Repeat the process for
Formatpath DeviceHarddisk0Partition2
Formatpath DeviceHarddisk0Partition3
Formatpath DeviceHarddisk0Partition4
Formatpath DeviceHarddisk0Partition5
Formatpath DeviceHarddisk0Partition6

Reconnect the FTP client and restore your backups to the appropiate hard drives. And thats it - remove the CDRW and reboot. Your Xbox should be as it was, only with 100Gb of extra storage.

Lock the HD

EvoX can lock your HD for you. Just edit your EvoX.ini and un hash the lock hard drive option. If you do not have this in your EvoX.ini, make sure you have the latest version. Many people upgrade the EvoX XBE but do not do anything with the new exox.ini file and so are missing the needed bits. You can use the new evox.ini, bit make sure you change the network settings to match your network - or you may need to boot off CDRW to get back in with FTP to fix it.

Just hit lock harddrive and it should just work. Its a good idea to edit evox.ini to remove the lock / unlock options as you will not need them. (If you do, its beyond the scope of this Tutorial).