I purchased an Xbox. I want to swap the internal HDD and soft-mod it...

[ThaKarra]

Hi all,

Today I purchased an original Xbox from a preowned game store. I can confirm the Xbox has no mod-chip or any kind of soft-mod. Its just completely vanilla and stock.

I want to upgrade the internal HDD and then run the soft-mod exploit using the Splinter Cell game method.

What is the best way to go about upgrading the internal HDD? I have a 400gb IDE HDD ready to go. Is it as simple as unscrewing the Xbox, removing the stock HDD, putting my 400gb HDD in and then going ahead with running the soft-mod exploit? Or is there a whole process to upgrading the HDD?

 

[DinohScene]

You'll have to softmod it before upgrading the HDD.
I recommend softmodding it and after doing that, run Chimp to clone the stock drive onto the 400 GB IDE drive.
Most importantly, make sure Chimp clones the C drive, the E drive isn't technically required for booting so you can FTP that later on if needed.

 

[FAST6191]

Just to add the basic softmod (that is to say not a chip and not TSOP) is kind of picky about the drives it uses -- they have to do something called locking (why you can't simply swap over without locking it to the EEPROM* key, or having a hardmod that does not care about such things) and it is a rarely used feature that not all drives (and also USB hard drive readers hence having a motherboard with IDE being the suggested method) implement.
https://xboxdrives.x-pec.com/?p=list is the main list but it is not exhaustive or always correct. If a drive fails to lock then it fails to lock, and you still have the original drive.

*check with I think it was liveinfo that it matches the serial on the back in case you have a virtual EEPROM as part of your softmod. Might want to email it to yourself just in case as well so if it breaks in a few years you can grab it from that.

 

[ThaKarra]

Thanks for the reply guys...

I started to follow a specific guide and I got to the point where I needed to unplug the DVD IDE cable and plug it to the upgraded drive so Chimp could clone it. Anyway something happened and it failed.. However I managed to get my EEPROM.

So I connected the IDE hard drive to an old PC I had (directly to the motherboard) and managed to create a new Xbox drive from scratch. I was then able to lock it using my EEPROM. I connected it back to my Xbox and all is working perfectly now.

 

[RHOPKINS13]

You might want to consider doing a TSOP flash, assuming it can be done on your motherboard version. Just requires soldering a few wires. Once flashed, you'll no longer need to lock hard drives in order to use them.

 

[konamicode89]

You might want to consider doing a TSOP flash, assuming it can be done on your motherboard version. Just requires soldering a few wires. Once flashed, you'll no longer need to lock hard drives in order to use them.

just when I was about to bring my old Xbox back from the grave, thanks for the tip.

 

[TJHeartnote]

https://www.xbmc4xbox.org.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?t=649 try this