Xbox Hard Disk Upgrade

During my last trip to Manila, I bought a 80Gb Seagate hard disk. I reckon it's time to replace the stock 10Gb one on the Xbox. I figure lots of people would be interested in knowing how to do this, so I'm putting the procedure down here.

Things you need:

• a modded Xbox (read my earlier post on how to do a software-only mod)
• ftp access to the Xbox to back up some critical directories
• a new hard disk (obviously)
• Torx 10, 15, and 20 screwdrivers (for console disassembly)
• blank CD-R/RW (for the xboxhdm boot CD)
• PC with bootable CD-RW drive

First thing you need to do is backup your current Xbox partitions and get the HDD key. The Evolution-X dashboard has just the thing for this. Within Evolution-X, go to the System Utils menu, then choose Backup. This will create a directory on drive C called Backup with the following files:

• bios.bin
• disk.bin
• eeprom.bin
• hddinfo.txt
• hddkey.bin

FTP these files to another PC. You will need these to lock and unlock hard disks. If you plan to use the old Xbox drive on a regular PC, it needs to be unlocked. To use your new hard disk on the Xbox, this has to be locked (after preparation) before the Xbox will accept it. Also ftp the contents of drives C: and E: to the PC, just in case anything goes wrong.

Moving on, get yourself a copy of xboxhdm. As of this writing, the latest version is v1.9. Extract the archive on your PC. Transfer the contents of the Xbox' C:\ and E:\ partitions to the \xboxhdm\linux directory. Copy the eeprom.bin file to \xboxhdm\linux\eeprom directory. Once that is finished, navigate back to the \xboxhdm directory and run the make-iso-win.bat file. If all goes will, you should end up with an ISO file called linux.iso. In my case, things didn't go so well. mkisofs for some reason doesn't want to run. It just quits, giving me this error message: "Not owner. Panic not able to reset original uid." If this happens to you, too, just Google for the latest version of mkisofs and download a copy. Just doing this took me more that an hour because the ftp servers hosting the newest Win32 mkisofs binary kept timing out. I had to search far and wide just to get a copy that will work on my particular setup.

With the linux.iso file, use your favourite CD-burning software to burn it on a CD-R/RW. Disconnect all the hard disks from the PC. Connect the new hard disk and set it as Single Master. Turn on the PC and boot from the xboxhdm live CD. Once the XboX HD Maker and recovery tool has booted up, choose Option 1 "Build a New Xbox HD from Scratch". After rebuilding the partitions and copying over the C: and E: contents, choose Option 3 "Boot Linux with Locking/Unlocking Utilities". At the prompt, type lockhd -a. After this step, your newly-prepared hard disk is ready to go.

Using the Torx screwdrivers, open up the Xbox console case. Remove the Torx screws holding down the DVD drive and the hard disk. Remove the old hard drive from its tray, and whack the new one in. Put everything back, and you've got yourself an upgraded Xbox.

If this post is still not detailed enough for you, try this one.