Hey guys, as I mentioned in a previous post I just recently soft modded my original Xbox and installed a 500GB HDD then proceeded to fill it with emulators and ripped all of my games to it. This morning I ordered a crystal Xbox which I would rather have under my AV setup, so the question I have is, can I take the soft modded HDD out of my black Xbox and simply replace the one in the crystal one, or do I have to go through with the soft mod from scratch and put all the software back on it? I tried searching but whenever I do I just get posts about hot swapping for bricked Xbox's.
You can't just swap it - on a soft modded box, you have to use a HDD locked with the correct key for the console. What you will need to do is to find the HDD key for the new box, unlock the drive and then relock it with the correct key for the new box - then it will work. So in practice you do need to soft mod the new box so you can get the EEPROM contents from it - or you could do a temporary install of a modchip to do the same thing.
Softmod your new machine, then install the old machine's eeprom on it. *Then* you can swap in your big HDD the original eeprom though, it allows you to work with the original HDD (using e.g. xboxhdm), should you want to do so later. I have the same eeprom on all of my Xboxes, so I can freely swap between them (I usually prep them on a properly chipped one, much more convenient than having to pay attention to not accidentally break a softmod).
So all your xboxes have the same MAC address? Doesn't that have ... interesting ... effects on the networking?
Unlock the 500gb harddrive on the xbox that it was originally in with chimp. Then softmod the crystal xbox and use chimp to lock the 500gb drive to the new xbox. Use the copy of chimp that is burned to a disc.
Might be a bit easier to just do a TSOP flash so you won't have to worry about locking the drives ever again.
Revisions 1.0 through 1.5 can be TSOP flashed. Just the 1.6 models have to have a chip for alternate BIOS. It's doable.
Evox M8+ and IND BIOS 5003 are 256K. Bonus of the IND BIOS is it has support for 128mb RAM should someone go that route. My 1.2 ran the IND BIOS when it was working.
If I remember correctly, you can do this by turning on both consoles without the DVD drive plugged in, causing error 12. When you get error 12, the drive will be unlocked. Then you can swap the hard drives and then turn off both boxes, plug in the drives, then you can turn them back on and the drives should be locked to the console they are in.
Nope 1.6 to 1.6b. To answer the OP. You're best to use XBOXHDM to lock the drive to the new XBOX, or just install a modchip there's really no other way unless you want to mess around with chimp.
Cheers for the info guys, I don't really want to go down the road of mod chips (never soldered in my life) and I don't have a windows pc to connect the HDD to so assuming the method kingkat mentioned doesn't work (??) I'll look into chimp as thats what I used for the HDD upgrade.
Hmmm, well modchips for 1.6 are a 1 wire install, very little could go wrong. Seems like Chimp is your option though.
Hmm, I'll look into it then, I've always wanted to get into proper modding, I want to install a bios chip in one of my Dreamcasts, I've got about 30 of 'em, perhaps I should practice my soldering skills on them hehe!
Yeah exactly bro, I'm not very good at soldering either, but I've custom modded XBOXes, a Saturn, repaired a few gameboy games for friends. It's all a matter of over thinking it, just take your time and you'll be fine