Cloning an Xbox Hard Drive

I recently acquired a DVT4 kit that doesn't boot past the boot animation. It had already been opened so I decided to open it myself. It was never in working condition with the previous owner.

It has an ST310211A hard drive that I would like to clone or at least copy the contents of the hard drive off of. For all I know, it's a blank hard drive, but I'd like to be safe before I start trying to fix it. I have plenty of old computers I can put the drive in, and I'm pretty sure that dev kits have unlocked hard drives.

What's the best way to go about this?

 

Wouldn't it be best to just boot off a disc with an ftp server, copy off anything of interest and then fix it while you are at it?

 

The disc drive doesn't open at the moment. I can use the pin hole to move the cogs and force eject it, but I'd imagine that it wouldn't even read the disc. I plan on kernel debugging it and seeing where it faults. With the disc drive not ejecting, I'd have to imagine that there's something wrong with either the disc drive itself or the DVD emulator board.

It might be best for me to go the route of getting the system in working order then seeing if there's anything worthwhile to transfer over with neighborhood.

 

I'd just get a working xbox dvd drive and get it to boot. You can dev patch the xbe and just run evox/avalaunch or something to get access to the hdd to copy things off or copy over missing files to repair it.

 

When it does hang, does Microsoft come across the bottom of the screen?

 

I put it all back together and the dvd drive ejects now. Maybe it was just a loose connection.

I'll try to get evox running now.

It does the blob animation and the big xbox logo comes up, but there's no Microsoft on the bottom.

Edit: I'm finding dev to retail patchers, but no retail to dev.

 

use dexbe IIRC, just enable debug and then build an ISO and burn it.

 

I tried several different ways to get an alternate dashboard to load but with no luck.

I put a different hard drive in and attempted to run a recovery disc that I burned to a dvd-r. The recovery is a pre-made iso which should be in the format of what the xbox is expecting. Because this recovery didn't load, I'm starting to think that there may be bigger issues with this kit.

For the sake of just figuring out if there's anything interesting on this hard drive, can I hook it up to one of my softmod systems? I recall a mod where one xbox could have three hard drives connected to it.

Edit: I guess that mod would only power one drive at a time, which wouldn't really be useful to me.

Edit: I'm starting to question if this drive is locked. I can get my bios to recognize the model number of the drive. Ubuntu even recognizes it as a 9.2GB drive on /dev/sda. Ubuntu will not let me copy the drive. It keeps spitting out some input output error.

Triple Edit: Got it working! Unfortunately the problem was the dvd emulator. I just bypassed it completely and it booted up. I'm guessing there's nothing on hard drive because the only things in the xdk launcher are audio console and xbox dashboard. I'm going to try get avalauch running and FTP it just for the sake of backing everything up. Thanks for all the help!

On a side note, do you guys think it would be possible to recover any delted data from the hard drive? I'm not too knowledge on the matter, but I know that when certain devices delete files, they just mark the addresses on the storage device as writable or free. Not sure if the xdk wipe frees the memory or overwrites it with empty data. xbe headers would be easy enough to search for if I could clone the drive.

Avalaunch isn't booting up for me. Is there a special way I have to burn it? XISO format maybe?

Edit: Finally got the recovery to load by burning it with alcohol 120. I guess imgburn wasn't cutting it. Still can't get avalaunch to boot though.

Another Edit: I installed a new hard drive, then ran the recovery. I was able to load up avalaunch by transferring it to the xbox through neighborhood. Also found out that the hard drive is in fact locked by running hdparm in linux. I'd still like to image the hard drive for a chance to poke around for any deleted files (if possible). This requires that I be able to unlock the hard drive. I tried running config magic on the other hard drive in an attempt to recover the eeprom.bin but it gave me an error that the eeprom was corrupt. I can't find a version of evox that will boot on the dev kit so I can't seem to dump the eeprom that way.

Do dev kits truely have unlocked hard drives, or is the key set to all zeros? I could always go the hotswap method, but that's not exactly my favorite.

 

edit: Using all zeros doesn't seem to unlock the hard drive either

 

You'd probably want to toss a xdk recovery install disc, tho what version XDK was on there? I think they're unlocked. I've replaced the HDD in mine w/ no issues however I did go the way I'd do it up as usual with XboxHDM after getting the eprom off the debug unit. Backed up all partions before doing so via FTP w/ avalaunch's Qwix That's odd EvoX won't boot off it, you need it to backup the eeprom properly before using it with XboxHDM.

 

Oops meant to edit that last one...

Got it figured out. I ended up just flashing the hard drive firmware which unlocked it. After that I was able to do a dd in linux to make an image. With a quick search I'm finding several XBE headers. Maybe with some luck I'll be able to recover some lost data.


Edit: Very cool findings! I was browsing through each xbe header and looking at the names associated with them. I found dolphin classic which I know for a fact was not on the system. Also found another xbe with the title "THE GODFATHER (RelU)". I don't have time to extract it (and the associated files) right now, but I'll try get it off later tonight. Also found a debug version of the xbe

Shows that if you have an "empty" xdk hard drive, don't start throwing files on it. Preserve it's current state as best you can to avoid overwriting the data of the deleted files.

Update: Got 9 xbe files relating to the godfather recovered. Now begins the tedious process of finding the associated files (maps, graphics, etc) Here's what the debug menu looks like http://imgur.com/gmE6lTV