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This tutorial is my way of giving back to this community for providing all of the information I needed to upgrade my drive. I did the upgrade a few nights ago, going back and forth through various threads, using trial and error, etc. Since I couldn't find a comprehensive step-by-step walkthrough, I decided to go ahead and write one to help out those who may want to do this.
I want to specifically thank roofus and anger, the guys who made Xplorer360, as well as TheSpecialist, the guy who made HDDHackr and also hacked Xplorer360 to play nice with the WD BEVS drive... I also want to thank him for taking the time to explain how to work with these tools, and I also want to thank folks in this thread for documenting what worked and didn't work for them. Most of the steps in this tutorial were gleaned directly from posts in that thread.
This tutorial may be reposted and distributed elsewhere as long as it is not modified and credit is given to the afore-mentioned folks (roofus, anger, TheSpecialist, and those from that thread.)
In this tutorial I will list the exact steps that I followed that led to success. Some of the steps may not be necessary and some may be redundant, but I wanted to be sure to document everything.
Also, this tutorial focuses pretty much just on the software needed and the steps required to make it work. I'm going to assume that you already know how to physically replace the hard drive. If you don't, there are plenty of other tutorials available (such as this one) that will show you how to do it.
Additionally, these steps were written with Windows XP in mind. If you are using a different OS (such as Vista) these steps may not work for you (but they should give you a pretty good idea what to do.)
And finally, the obligatory disclaimer: you do this at your own risk! If you end up destroying your 360 hard drive, your shiny new 120GB WD BEVS drive, or your PC I cannot be held responsible, even if you follow these steps to the letter.
Ok, let's get this thing started!
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What you'll need:
hardware:
software:
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The Steps:
Now, Shutdown your PC, pop the 120GB drive into your 360 enclosure. It's probably a good idea to only partially assemble it so you can test it. If you hook it up and your 360 boots up and looks like it did on your 20GB, you should be done!
You may want to check your XBL connection and ensure your XBLA games and other DLC works. You might also verify that your original XBox games still work, and check a game save or two just to make sure nothing is corrupted. Then turn off your 360, reassemble your drive, hook it back up, fire up your 360, and bask in the knowledge that you spent $70 and about an hour (of work time, not data-copying time) instead of $180 to upgrade your 360 from 20GB to 120GB.
I want to specifically thank roofus and anger, the guys who made Xplorer360, as well as TheSpecialist, the guy who made HDDHackr and also hacked Xplorer360 to play nice with the WD BEVS drive... I also want to thank him for taking the time to explain how to work with these tools, and I also want to thank folks in this thread for documenting what worked and didn't work for them. Most of the steps in this tutorial were gleaned directly from posts in that thread.
This tutorial may be reposted and distributed elsewhere as long as it is not modified and credit is given to the afore-mentioned folks (roofus, anger, TheSpecialist, and those from that thread.)
In this tutorial I will list the exact steps that I followed that led to success. Some of the steps may not be necessary and some may be redundant, but I wanted to be sure to document everything.
Also, this tutorial focuses pretty much just on the software needed and the steps required to make it work. I'm going to assume that you already know how to physically replace the hard drive. If you don't, there are plenty of other tutorials available (such as this one) that will show you how to do it.
Additionally, these steps were written with Windows XP in mind. If you are using a different OS (such as Vista) these steps may not work for you (but they should give you a pretty good idea what to do.)
And finally, the obligatory disclaimer: you do this at your own risk! If you end up destroying your 360 hard drive, your shiny new 120GB WD BEVS drive, or your PC I cannot be held responsible, even if you follow these steps to the letter.
Ok, let's get this thing started!
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
What you'll need:
hardware:
- A PC (duh) with a SATA controller. If your PC is antiquated like mine you'll need an add-on card (I used this one it comes with all the cables you'll need and it's natively recognized by HDDHackr, though be warned it apparently has compatibility issues with some motherboards.)
- A Western Digital Scorpio WD1200BEVS 120 GB SATA hard drive
- A Floppy boot disk (go here for disk images, I used a Windows 98SE OEM boot disk. You could probably also use a bootable flash drive or a zip disk or something as long as the media is writable under DOS)
- A Xbox 360 w/ a 20GB hard drive (duh)
software:
- HDDHackr
- Xplorer360 Beta 6
- Xplorer360 'extreme build 2' (you may be able to just use this hacked version and not need the Beta 6 version at all... you may also be able to skip some of the steps in this tutorial thanks to this version, which I will note.)
- Winhex (needed for verification purposes)
- Hex Workshop (needed unless you have a registered version of Winhex.)
- A hddss.bin dumped from a retail 360 120GB hdd (I'm not linking to one because they contain copyrighted code. You're smart, I'm sure you can find some way to get ahold of one.)
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The Steps:
- Copy HDDHackr.com and the hddss.bin file to your bootable floppy disk.
- Turn off your PC, connect the WD BEVS drive, and boot the PC up on the floppy (I also disconnected my PC's hard drive just to be safe.)
- At the command prompt type "hddhackr -f" and hit enter. Follow through the prompts and be sure to create an undo file when asked.
- When it's finished, reboot on the floppy again. Run "hddhackr -f" again and it will tell you if the drive will be compatible with your 360 or not.
- Turn off your PC, disconnect the WD BEVS, and disconnect your 20GB drive from your 360. Disassemble the casing, and remove the 20GB drive. Hook the WB BEVS up to the connector and plug it into the 360. You're going to have to unhook the drive and pull it out again so I'd recommend not completely reassembling the casing... I just put one screw in to hold the drive in.
- Turn on your 360, goto the system blade, "console settings", and "system info." Jot down the serial number, you'll need it in the next step.
- Go back to the system blade, goto "memory" and you should have the option to format the drive. It will ask for the serial number, type it in and send it flying. (if it says "no device detected" something is wrong. Check the connections.)
- While it's formatting go ahead and hook the 20GB hard drive up to your PC. Boot up into Windows, create a folder on your desktop called "xbox" and run Xplorer360 Beta 6 (you may also be able to use the "extreme build 2" version.)
- Within Xplorer360 click "Drive" then "Open" then "Hard Drive or Mem Card". It should take a few seconds and then pop up some partitions in the left hand window. (If it doesn't detect the drive, check the connections and also make sure that your SATA controller driver is properly installed.)
- Click on Partition 03, select all the items in the right hand window, and drag and drop them to the folder you created on your desktop. If you get errors you'll have to open task manager (ctrl-alt-del) and manually kill the program... reopen the program and drag and drop the folders one at a time. When you find the problem folder create a subfolder in the xbox folder on your desktop with the same name as the problem folder, go into the problem folder and copy the folders/files in there one at a time. You may have to do this a few times, creating folders within folders. For me the problem file was a 0kb .db file within the compatibility folder under a few subfolders. I couldn't get the file to copy so I just created a blank text file and renamed it to the exact name of the file (it was st.db or something like that.) Once the copy starts going it will probably take awhile, depending on how much data you have... so take a break.
- Close Xplorer360 and run the Xplorer360 "extreme build 2" hack. Open the drive like you did in step 9 and choose the "backup partition 2" option to dump the second partition to a bin file (named part2.bin or something like that.) It should create a 262MB file.
- Shutdown the PC and disconnect the 20GB drive. By this time the 360 should be done formatting the drive, so turn it off and disconnect the 120GB drive. Hook it up to the PC and boot up to Windows.
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Now for the "tricky" (and possibly unnecessary) parts. If you are using the "extreme build 2" hack of Xplorer 360 some or all of the steps in this section may not be required... I don't know for sure. I did the steps exactly as I'm going to show here and it worked for me. - Open up Hex Workshop. Click "Options" and "Preferences." On the "Layout" tab in the "Rows" section uncheck the "Fit to Window" box and ensure the Bytes/Row is set to 16. This isn't necessary but it makes the next steps easier.
- Click "Disk" then "Open Drive", change the "Select" drop down to Physical Disks and locate your 120GB drive. Be sure you select the correct drive or this could potentially cause catastrophic problems.
- This is the potentially tricky part. You need to get to byte 80000 in hex, but Hex Workshop doesn't let you go to a specific byte offset on drives, only to a specific sector. Assuming the sector size of your drive is the same as mine, or 512 decimal bytes (which I can't think of any reason why it wouldn't be,) the sector you should have to goto is 400 (hex.) You do this by clicking "Edit" then "Goto", typing 400 in the "Offset" field and choosing "Beginning of Drive" in the "From Where" section. If the sector size is different for some reason, you'll have to do a little math to get to the right offset (here's my math, just to give you an idea... 0x80000 is 524288 in decimal. 524288/512 (the sector size) is 1024, 1024 is 400 in hex. You could probably do all the math in hex, but I'm not good at hex math so I convert to decimal.)
- You should see a bunch of columns numbered 0-F, and they should all have "00" in them. If they have anything else in them you are either working with the wrong drive or you are at the wrong offset, don't change anything! Otherwise change the columns as follows:
58 54 41 46 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 10 00 00 00 01
And save by clicking the disk icon or clicking "File" and "Save" - Leaving Hex Workshop open, open up Winhex and either goto offset 80000 or do a search for the word "XTAF." Verify that starting at byte 80000 you see the string above (58 54 41 46, etc.) If you do see the string, go on to the next step. If you don't then you need to back to Hex Workshop and undo your changes, and then find the correct offset to make the changes to. If you are lucky enough to have a registered copy of Winhex or another hex editor that lets you goto a specific byte, you can simply navigate to byte offset 0x80000 and make the changes. The shareware version of Winhex does not allow you to save though.
- Within Hex Workshop open Xplorer360.exe (the beta 6 version, not the "extreme build 2" version.) I'm assuming that this change already exists in the "extreme build 2" version so you can probably skip this step, but I'm including it because I did this. Goto offset F0C2 (hex) where you will find the following values:
68 77 03
change them to:
00 C2 1A
Save the file. You will be prompted to make a backup, which is always a good idea.
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The rest of these steps fall are most definitely "necessary". - Load Xplorer360 beta 6 version (you can probably use the "extreme build 2" version, but I don't know for sure) and open the 120GB drive like you did with the 20GB drive in step 9. If the drive won't open or it opens but you can't access the partitions then something isn't right, go back and check your work.
- Expand Partition 03 and copy all of the data from the xbox folder you created on your desktop. This will take awhile depending on how much data you have, so take another break.
- Close Xplorer360 Beta 6 and open the "extreme build 2" version. Open the drive, then select "restore partition 2", select the 262mb bin file you made in step 11 (part2.bin.) Once it completes, your drive is ready!
Now, Shutdown your PC, pop the 120GB drive into your 360 enclosure. It's probably a good idea to only partially assemble it so you can test it. If you hook it up and your 360 boots up and looks like it did on your 20GB, you should be done!
You may want to check your XBL connection and ensure your XBLA games and other DLC works. You might also verify that your original XBox games still work, and check a game save or two just to make sure nothing is corrupted. Then turn off your 360, reassemble your drive, hook it back up, fire up your 360, and bask in the knowledge that you spent $70 and about an hour (of work time, not data-copying time) instead of $180 to upgrade your 360 from 20GB to 120GB.
