Copying everything from one RGH console to another, need help

[DrVlikhell]

Disclaimer: I'm not a console guy, just a tinkerer who offered to help a friend. But now I think I'm in over my head...

So we have two Jasper 360s here, both are RGH'd. One with a mod chip and one RGH 3.0 that I did myself last weekend. The one with the mod chip was done a few years ago by someone else. It has a 2tb drive with almost 1.2tb of games, dlc, title updates, mods, box art, metadata, etc, with Aurora, Dashlaunch and all that. The second 360 with the RGH 3.0 has nothing on it. I have a 2tb hdd for it and I was hoping to be able to just straight copy all the stuff from the old console to the new one with FatXplorer... but that's not turning out to be the case.

Questions and Issues:
1. Partitions: The old hard drive has partitions that the new one doesn't; backwards compatibility, system auxiliary, and system extended. Does the new hard drive need these partitions? I can create them by formatting the drive in FatXplorer, but FatXplorer doesn't ask for the consoles serial number in the process. I'm guessing maybe an RGH console doesn't need to have a hard drive formatted with the serial number? If that's the case I'll just go with that.

2. Security Sector: The new hard drive doesn't have any security sector information. Does it need it? FatXplorer can create it by using a backup of the security sector from the original 120gb hard drive, but then the 2tb drive shows up as a 120gb drive. So I'm guessing to just skip the security sector all together since the consoles are RGH'd?

3. Speed: I mounted both the old 2tb drive and the new one in FatXplorer and started copying the content partition but it said it would take between 30 and 57 hours (the time kept going up and down). Is there any way to do this faster? Maybe with Clonezilla or other drive cloning software?

4. Aurora + Dashlaunch: From what I've been reading it seems that copying over all the contents of the hard drive isn't enough to also properly copy over Aurora and Dashlaunch with all their settings and stuff. Do I have to first set these up on the new console fresh and then copy over the data? Or how do I go about doing this?

5: Full backup: If I use FatXplorer to make a full backup of the old 2tb hard drive and then restore the backup to the new 2tb hard drive, will it work in the new console, or will the new console reject it because it has the serial number of the old console?

I've been searching for these answers for days but so many results are very old and don't seem to apply any more, or are intended for upgrading a hard drive for the same exact console. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

In case you're wondering why (skip the following story if you're not), I live in South Florida where we suffered huge damage from Hurricane Ian. My friends apartment was completely destroyed by flood waters, total loss except for clothes and anything above 6 feet high. The Xbox 360 normally sits on a shelf below the TV but another console was in its place that day and the 360 was put up on top of a media cabinet to keep it from getting stepped on or knocked over by the cats. It was the only piece of electronics to survive the storm. That is a blessing in itself because the 360 has dozens and dozens of hours of work put into it ripping games, getting DLC, doing title updates, downloading metadata and box art, finding and installing working mods, and configuring and tweaking Aurora. All the other consoles were stock or lightly modded and can just be purchased again, but not the 360. So now my friend wants to make a backup of the entire system to store at another location in case something like this happens again.

 

[DinohScene]

RGH machines ignore security sectors, it's not needed.

What you could do, provided you have 1.2 TB of temp space on your PC, is to FTP everything over to your computer and then FTP it all to the new machine.
Granted it's a slow process but it's pretty much fool proof.

Dashlaunch is just a matter of copying over the right settings.

 

[DrVlikhell]

RGH machines ignore security sectors, it's not needed.

What you could do, provided you have 1.2 TB of temp space on your PC, is to FTP everything over to your computer and then FTP it all to the new machine.
Granted it's a slow process but it's pretty much fool proof.

Dashlaunch is just a matter of copying over the right settings.

Thanks for the reply. Since RGH consoles ignore security sectors, does that mean the new console won't care that the new drive wasn't formatted with its serial number? I'm loosely guessing the security sector is where the console stores the serial number during it's formatting process? If so, that would be great. Two down with one shot.

Unfortunately I only have enough space on the drive(s) that the stuff needs to go on. I was planning to buy another storage drive eventually... just not exactly right now.

On a whim I decided to try the FatXplorer beta, which has fewer options but also has a read-only option, which makes me feel better about leaving the source drive mounted in Windows for a long time. Plus, for whatever reason, it says it's only going to take seven or eight hours to copy the 1.2tb content folder. So I guess I'll let it keep on doing that and see what happens when it's done.

 

[DinohScene]

Could be that a few saved games/dlc etc won't work, they might be bound to the old console
Most of the things on the drives can be exchanged between machines without an issue.

I'd agree with just letting it do that, if it work it works.

 

[CoolMe]

Yea, either ftp or copy/move to an external hdd (a fat32 formatted drive), the latter is not bad speed-wise, but since we're talking 2TB worth of data it might take like +12 hours at the least..
As for Aurora, you'll have to rebuild the database as you can't just drag and drop them and expect them to work, it'll also redownload all the assets/covers etc. But not game updates, since they're stored on a separate folder (00000000000000).

 

[DarkKnight_TJ]

In my case I would clone disc using clonezilla or hddrawcopy tool

 

[godreborn]

1. format and add partition with partition fixer. The fixer doesn't format the drive.

2. Security sectors are ignored

3. You could backup through ethernet if it's that slow.

4 and 5. Aurora will have the old serial, yes. Dashlaunch will not be affected as long as the launch.ini is present.

 

[CoolMe]

In my case I would clone disc using clonezilla or hddrawcopy tool

I don't think you could just clone the old 360 hdd and put the data on the new one. the new hdd has to be formatted by the Xbox at first (atleast), not saying that you said it doesn't need to be formatted..
Also the cloning procedure and restoring/ putting data on the new hdd is done on the pc side, from my experience 360 hdds are somewhat finicky even with hdd explorer tools that are designed for it, so i wouldn't trust the cloning method even if the software says all went well & all data was backed up.

 

[DrVlikhell]

Thanks for all the replies. I figured I'd come back and let you all know what I did and how it worked out, and also what didn't work (for me).

So I did initially format the new drive with the new xbox, but that left me with missing partitions as I described above. So then I reformatted it with FatXplorer and that gave me the option to add the missing partitions so I did that.

As stated above the security sector is indeed not needed, and also apparently not wanted. When I copied the security sector (via security sector backup and restore function with FatXplorer) from the new Xbox's original 120gb HDD onto the new 2tb HDD, the 2tb HDD was then showing up as a 120gb HDD. So I reformatted the 2tb drive again with FatXplorer to get rid of that.

Afterwards I connected both the old 2tb HDD (via USB to SATA adapter) and the new 2tb (via SATA directly) to my computer. I mounted both drives in Windows using FatXplorer Beta instead of the trial because the trial had run out, and then I copied the partitions manually in Windows Explorer as if they were any other files. (Sidenote: I use UIltraCopier because sometimes the native Windows file copy freaks out with large transfers.) For whatever reason this combination resulted in a 9 hour copy operation for the 1.12gb of the content partition, which was very acceptable. The other partitions went over in just a few minutes or less.

Because my friend is especially paranoid he also wanted me to make another backup of just the hard drive. So then I put both the original 2tb HDD and a new new 2tb HDD in a different computer, both connected directly via SATA ports (no USB). I used a different computer so I wouldn't have this computer tied up for 9 hours. Not that I can't do anything else while files copy, but if the computer happens to crash while playing Warzone or something then the copy operation has to start all over again. The other computer didn't like that and gave an IO error when I tried to copy from one drive to the other by mounting them with FatXplorer. So then I used a third computer, again connected via SATA directly, and tried Clonezilla, that didn't work. Then I tried Acronis, that didn't work either. I forget the error message on them but it was right away. Then I tried a Windows program called AOMEI partition assistant (mentioned on this forum in another thread) and that worked. I set it to ignore partition information and do a sector by sector copy. That took 12 hours but there were no errors. FatXplorer sees the new new 2tb HDD as an Xbox drive so we're all good there, I think.

Why didn't I copy everything over manually after mounting the drives with FatExplorer like the first time? Because at that point I didn't know if that procedure had produced positive results or not. I don't know crap about setting up Aurora, Dashlaunch, or FSD myself so I wouldn't know how to tell if there were major problems with the results or not. I decided to go with a different method for the new new 2tb HDD in case the first method hadn't worked, at least then I'd have a chance for the second method to work instead of potentially having wasted time doing the same thing twice. Also after getting an IO error on the second computer I was rather concerned about something messing with the original 2tb drive and loosing data on it, so I was looking for a way to image the whole drive without disturbing the data. But it turned out to be all good and I learned two ways to copy an Xbox HDD.

The original 2tb HDD was unphased by all of this and still works fine in the original console. The new console accepted the new 2tb HDD, even the account information was copied over. All of the game titles were greyed out in Aurora, but that was fixed by deleting and redoing the paths in Aurora. Then all of the cover art and metadata had to be redownloaded, as mentioned above. I think there were a couple more things that had to be adjusted in Aurora and/or FSD, but they were minor and I think just had to do with the cover art, and it had to reconnect to Unity to get some ID thing. I was more interested in eating pizza at that point than watching what my friend was doing. After that everything works exactly like the first console. There was no need to reinstall Aurora, Dashlaunch or FSD. As for the new new drive that was copied with AOMEI partition assistant... I don't know if it works in the Xbox because my friend didn't feel like taking apart the hard drive caddy again to test it out. But since all of the game files/save data/mods/dlc/etc are visible in FatXplorer, that's a good enough backup for him, and good enough for me as well.

 

[TheStonedModder]

RGH machines ignore security sectors, it's not needed.

What you could do, provided you have 1.2 TB of temp space on your PC, is to FTP everything over to your computer and then FTP it all to the new machine.
Granted it's a slow process but it's pretty much fool proof.

Dashlaunch is just a matter of copying over the right settings.

Can’t you just use a usb 3 sata adapter (or just plug the hdds into your mobo directly) and copy everything that way?

It’s been a few years since I’ve messed with these systems but I vaugly recall doing that to save time before

 

[godreborn]

Can’t you just use a usb 3 sata adapter (or just plug the hdds into your mobo directly) and copy everything that way?

It’s been a few years since I’ve messed with these systems but I vaugly recall doing that to save time before

Some files will not transfer from what I remember. I think it's due to the windows file system.

 

[TheStonedModder]

Some files will not transfer from what I remember. I think it's due to the windows file system.

I recall using a tool like partybuffallo to get around that.

But my memory is so hazy it’s very possible I’m just thinking of something else

I’ll have to scrounge through some of my old se7ensins posts. I’m curious now ha

 

[DrVlikhell]

Can’t you just use a usb 3 sata adapter (or just plug the hdds into your mobo directly) and copy everything that way?

It’s been a few years since I’ve messed with these systems but I vaugly recall doing that to save time before

I guess you didn't read the book I wrote just above your post, but no, Windows does not natively read the Xbox 360 file system, which is FATX. If you use FatXplorer for Windows you can mount the drive in Windows and then copy everything over.

Some files will not transfer from what I remember. I think it's due to the windows file system.

As I laid out above, everything did in fact copy over just fine.

I recall using a tool like partybuffallo to get around that.

But my memory is so hazy it’s very possible I’m just thinking of something else

I’ll have to scrounge through some of my old se7ensins posts. I’m curious now ha

I'm starting to think my post didn't go through. I just outlined that specifically 3 posts up.

 

[godreborn]

I guess you didn't read the book I wrote just above your post, but no, Windows does not natively read the Xbox 360 file system, which is FATX. If you use FatXplorer for Windows you can mount the drive in Windows and then copy everything over.

As I laid out above, everything did in fact copy over just fine.

I'm starting to think my post didn't go through. I just outlined that specifically 3 posts up.

Who the hell is going to read that? Did your outline a tl;Dr that I'm missing?

 

[DrVlikhell]

Who the hell is going to read that? Did your outline a tl;Dr that I'm missing?

I do, actually. I read many, many posts, both short and long on this forum and others when looking for relevant/recent information on how to get this done.

 

[TheStonedModder]

I guess you didn't read the book I wrote just above your post, but no, Windows does not natively read the Xbox 360 file system, which is FATX. If you use FatXplorer for Windows you can mount the drive in Windows and then copy everything over.

As I laid out above, everything did in fact copy over just fine.

I'm starting to think my post didn't go through. I just outlined that specifically 3 posts up.

No need to be rude.

Your response was a reply and not in the OP..which is what I quoted

A simple “you’re almost there but you gotta use fatx explorer instead” would have sufficed or a “hey maybe check out this other post you may have missed”

But instead you chose to be a dick

 

[godreborn]

I do, actually. I read many, many posts, both short and long on this forum and others when looking for relevant/recent information on how to get this done.

Why should anyone help you if you're going to crop this attitude?

 

[DrVlikhell]

No need to be rude.

Your response was a reply and not in the OP..which is what I quoted

A simple “you’re almost there but you gotta use fatx explorer instead” would have sufficed or a “hey maybe check out this other post you may have missed”

But instead you chose to be a dick

Not trying to be a dick, but I do think it's rude when people ask a question that I answered very well literally two posts above.

I mean, how do you feel when you get ignored like that?

Why should anyone help you if you're going to crop this attitude?

I'm no longer asking for help, you would know that if you read.

 

[TheStonedModder]

Not trying to be a dick, but I do think it's rude when people ask a question that I answered very well literally two posts above.

I mean, how do you feel when you get ignored like that?

I'm no longer asking for help, you would know that if you read.

To be fair I went back and read that post..it’s so long and full of information we don’t need or care about

You legit wrote a short story and added information we don’t need/care about. Like you included different things your friend wanted and even you wanting pizza at one point

Also I really wasn’t asking a question..I was giving you some advice to help point you in the right direction and simply stated that it should be double checked…

And I happened to be not far off(wrong program)

So get off your high horse dude

 

[Nimrod-002]

my rgh 2.0 Corona just died, can i buy another rgh xbox and plug the hdd from the dead console and have my profile with with the saves and everything ready to go?