Okay, so I'm looking to buy a WD 250 GB HDD, and make it work in my retail 360 as a normal 360 HDD would. I've been told this works, and is a cheaper method than just buying the 250 GB HDD. I'm here to ask you wonderful people for details on how to do this, what tools I need, prices of the drive, drive model. Also, has anyone ever been banned for using a third party drive on a retail 360? Is there a risk of being banned? Can someone please help? I'd greatly appreciate it. I know I'm coming off as a total noob, but I'm low on cash, the 250 GB HDD for the 360 is a little too steep for me. I just want to take the cheap route, get it working properly without too much of a hassle, and not get banned from XBL for using it. Will I be able to save my DLC on it, saves, etc? Thanks for reading, I hope to hear some helpful replies :thumbsup: EDIT: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136123 I'm guessing the above link will be perfect for what I want to do. Now then, can anyone tell me what else I need to get? I'd greatly appreciate it.
You'll need HDDHackr and the security sector from a 250GB MS drive. HDDHackr is commonly found, the hddss.bin from the 250 is MS copyrighted so you'll need to use Google a bit to find it. Once you have all the tools, the process is pretty straightforward. Do a search for HDDHackr Xbox upgrade and you should get plenty of hits. Takes about 30-60 minutes to do the whole thing. And no ban worries with this because it doesn't allow you to run *any* pirated or unsigned stuff. It ends up working just like a retail drive. -hl718
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136279 How would this HDD work? Do I need any special cables? Will a transfer cable work with a homemade drive? I want to copy over content I already have. Is there any possibility of the HDD being detected and disabled in the future? Is there a possibility I'll be banned? Also, not really too clear on laptop HDDs, can I hook them up in my desktop without buying any special adaptors? Please reply, I'm hoping to buy within the next hour or so.
Yes and maybe yes, as you're basically cloning an legal HDD. If they eventually find 100(s) of people on XBOX Live using the same HDD they might be pissed/angry. Then probably some Chinese pirate sold a few thousand with the exact same HDDSS.bin. They never did anything about it, probably as they fear to hit legitimate customers who bought pirated drives believing they were legit. You're tanking a risk by doing it, though.
If anything, I think they'd disable the use of the HDD and not issue any bans. I mean, there could be 1,000s of people using them without even knowing it. I doubt MS would go throwing bans around like crazy and hurt tons of legit users and possibly encounter law-suits and deal with irate people all day for a month or so. Can anyone address any of my other concerns listed above in my previous post?
It'll work just like a stock, retail 360 hard drive once formatted. You take the existing 20GB out of its case and replace it with the new 250 GB drive. You can then use the 20GB, throw it away, whatever you want. Transfer cable will work through the 360 UI, but you can just use PC tools to copy the info over during the process. There is no reasonable way for MS to ban a drive formatted at home, mostly because it's a direct hardware replacement that doesn't enable piracy or get around any security checks. This means that any ban would hit hundreds of thousands of people who aren't pirating shit and are paying members of the 360 ecosystem. It would be a HORRIBLE business decision to do so (and that's why MS hasn't made any move against homemade drives in the 5 years that the 360 has been out). Here's a link to a quick tutorial. As I mntioned, if you just google you'll turn up plenty of step-by-step walkthroughs. http://digiex.net/computing-section...ck-250gb-sata-drive-work-360-a.html#post21373 -hl718
Thanks, I really appreciate it. I've been reading up on it. I need more storage space for my 360 , but MS and their nazi prices put me off of buying their products. They're overpricing the stuff, and it's just pathetic to say we can't use third party stuff. Isn't what they're doing monopolizing? Not allowing any chance for competitors to exist? Isn't that, you know.. Illegal in the United States? Anyways guys, thanks for the great replies! This site has really pulled through for me several times now, I love it here.
Datel sued MS because it patched the system software to block Datel's 3rd party memory unit. What MS did ? It removed the MU unit slot from the new console currently under development and added an function which allows all XBOX360s to use pendrives as MUs. That's "troll-tastic" from MS part... :lol:
Well, I quite enjoy the use of USB drives on the 360. It's good for backing up DLC obtained from special edition games like RE5 Gold Edition.
I loved it too. But I'm sure they actually gave up from selling the MUs for two reasons: 1- They're so expensive and size limited that people prefer to use HDDs. 2- To piss off Datel. I'd say some revenge for being sued by them. :lol:
HL718 refered me here.... I've borked my retail HDD as below and am looking to rebuild it. Sorry didn't realise there was a similar thread going on. I think I've got my head around things but I don't want to assume anything else. So far as I can gleam this is the situation: -For a HDD drive to be recognised as XBOX360 compatible it has to have a valid sector 16 also known as the security sector. -Sector 16 of the Harddrive contains (among other things) the make, product no and serial no of the hard drive. - HDDHACKR will let me dump the relevant parts of the HDD's firmware (HDSS.bin) which can then be (re-)written to sector 16 to allow both 3rd party drives to work and also (hopefully) recover mine. - The information in sector 16 and the firmware must match for the disk to be recognised by the xbox -HDDHACKR is able to flash the firmware of Western Digital hard disks to make them appear as Fujitsu/samsung drives and therefore match the HDSS.bin dump of a legit HDD. Therefore... If I use "HDDHACKR -d" to dump the firmware of the 120GB drive I wiped the security sector of and then run "HDDHACKR -f" to rebuild sector 16 but don't reflash the firmware everything should work. Is my logic sound?
HDDhacker works by taking an HDDSS.bin and an Wester Digital Scorpio series HDD, making the Scorpio comply (match) with the HDDSS.bin file you gave it as input. The programmer who made it knows the vendor specific commands to modify the Scorpio firmware and make it reply make/model and S/N as same the HDDSS.bin (which is a file containing the Microsoft logo, information about the original drive it came written in and packaged/certified by RSA2048 signature/hash) So your best shot is call MS, tell them you screwed up with the transfer cable and see if they're willing to help you by re-certifying your drive.
I ended up buying a 250GB Western Digital and a Sata Caddy. Looks like I've gained a 120GB removable hard drive/paperweight.
