First I assume you are familiar with practices xbox regarding homebrew. If not long story short to keep sites out of the crosshairs of MS seen as most homebrew is built using their dev tools the original xbox homebrewers and now the 360 ones do not post files as we do for wii homebrew. Instead there is a network called xbins, it is somewhat complex but we do have simple methods like easy xbins
http://www.360mods.net/index.php?file=deta...;name=downloads
That is not to say you can not find files by themselves but that is a different matter. Equally most of the PC side programs can be downloaded normally.
JTAG then
Hard drives- got a case or another means of wiring it in and all is good. Unlike stock 360s you can use any drive you like (do note three and a half inch drives will need 12V from somewhere so stick with laptop drives unless you are handy with a soldering iron).
Hard drives while nice and I would certainly prefer not to be without one are not that necessary these days-
You can use up to 16 gigs of a regular USB drive to store profiles, saves and XBLA (not sure about DLC but probably that too)- you use the same methods that non JTAG users do*.
*MS added USB support a while back, it takes up to 16 gigs (formatting it not an accurate term as the rest of the data stays put) and puts it into a hidden folder/file for use by the 360.
External hard drives can be used to run the vast majority of games (I think Fable 2 and likely do not care for it) by simply extracting the iso and running it from a loader (freestyle dash aka FSD and xexmenu* being the big two) is easy enough (exiso or one of the GUIs for it along with xexmenu being the main programs, freestyle Dash and xexmenu also have extraction/copying abilities).
XBLA can be done like this (360Dashit which is much like xexmenu and freestyledash) being a good start here) but it can get annoying (not all menus/loaders support it fully- most rely on hard drive/360 "formatted" USB for XBLA and certainly DLC.
*the obvious question of "how do I get to being able to run it in the first place- you can inject the xexmenu program onto a 360 "formatted" USB drive using xtaf or you can burn a simple single layer disc.
On the subject of FTP just about everything on the 360 revolves around it so get used to it or get used to doing things in a long convoluted method. By and large the address is your 360, the username is xbox and the password is also xbox (port you can leave blank or just use 21)
Once you have a "proper" 360 hard drive the option of a GOD install appears (you can also convert NXE installs- "copy disc to drive" to GOD installs). GOD stands for games on demand and is a way of making 360 games appear to the 360 like XBLA would (you run them the same way even). The program ISO2GOD can make these installs (NXE2GOD does it if you installed the disc to the hard drive).
Equally once you have a hard drive the question of where to put things arises. Three (well maybe four) things to know in this case
The hard drive has 3 partitions, the biggest one (partition3 being the most common term for it) is where it all happens.
http://360.kingla.com/ is quite useful to know about in this case.
1) Games (GOD installs), XBLA and DLC all go in /partition3/content/0000000000000000/ and games themselves are usually reduced to numbers 575207d3 being FEAR 2 for instance- that kingla link above has most of them.
2) Games when using a loader like xexmenu can be anywhere but the GAMES folder on the root of the USB and/or hard drive is where it automatically looks and makes a list for.
3) Title updates which are necessary for DLC are added in
http://xbuc.net/ alongside filetrip and any other number of sites will net you title updates and good DLC groups will also include the relevant title updates.
edit* Forgot one thing- some XBLA and DLC is for use with hacked/shared profiles, scene stuff is not but that might be harder to find depending on your methods. If so a copy of XM360 will sort you*
After this you have saves and profile locations (there are a lot of save editors) but that is for later.
I will spare what goes when we need to upgrade NAND/dashboard/loader for later as it is probably not that necessary. Equally I will spare things like dashlaunch and hacks as they are very nice (indeed system link over the internet/VPN is possible) but not that important right away (read the NFO for more
http://www.xbins.org/nfo.php?file=xboxnfo1887.nfo ).
Anyhow that is commercial games more or less covered, homebrew is pretty much download and run it from xexmenu or FSD. There is a bit of stuff out there but nothing like the original xbox, the wii or the DS.
Even with a JTAG box I do not suggest fiddling with original xbox stuff (get an original xbox- far easier and ultimately far better) but if you must iso2GOD will also work for that and there is a hacked emulator (which you will probably need anyway if you have to build a hard drive from scratch) that allows modded games, games not officially supported and all the nice things you would expect out of a JTAG box.
