Be Excellent To Each Other

Time to do some lyrical waxing.

Last week I successfully softmodded my (free) xbox. I recased it with a nice tranny green casing and all was good in the world. I've had many a late night since then playing SNES and MD games.. Triffic fun !.

Today my network cable (crossover) finally game. My Xbox sits right next to my P.C so it was no bother getting them connected. Good part is my P.C has 3 network cards. 1 wireless PCI card and 2 onboard gigabit Intels. I used one of the wired cards to connect directly to the Xbox and configured the network card to talk to the Xbox and the Xbox to talk back to it.

All went very well and apart from a Passive transfer problem (which the Xbox doesn't support) I was FTP-ing to the Xbox in no time. Put on the N64 emulator which works well for Mario64 and Mariokart but doesn't like Goldeneye or Mario golf (which I was expecting in honesty) and played some M64.

Then I played with XBMX (Xbox media center) and it was simply brilliant. Then it all of a sudden it dawned on me that my Xbox only has a 10gb drive and you can only store on 2 of the partitions, giving me about 3gb to play with. At first I decided to just FTP what I wanted to watch, then delete it, then replace it. I cannot use larger or unlocked drives in my Xbox because it is soft modded and you need a chip to read unlocked drives (as my friend found out by pushing it a bit too far..).

However, after doing some poking on XBMC I realised you can read SMB shared drives.. Ooo ! if I could get this to work I would be laughing because my P.C is configured into two drives. I have a 250gb main drive running XPMCE and a 500gb drive set up as folders like Audio, Video and so on.. IF I could just get the Xbox to see that drive all of my storage problems would evaporate.

And I did Best thing is XBMC is absolutely awesome in the way it looks and is set up. Now I have the media solution I have been looking for for ages, and don't need to build a Media PC.

Kickass

It can't do HD but in almost every other respect it's near perfect yes.

Why not just get a video out for your PC if they are in the same place?

XBMC is made of pure win. We've spent many happy hours watching ("legally obtained" -Ed.) movies, playing Pipe Dream and Tetris vs Dr Mario on the emulators. Bliss!

False.

You can use almost any IDE drive with an Xbox, even a softmodded one. What you have to do is lock the new hard drive using the same key as the old one.

Depending on where you got your softmod utility from, there may be a pdf about maintaining your Xbox included in the rar. In my copy of Ndure SID, there's a PDF which explains how to replace the hard drive.

It basically goes along these lines:
Copy the eeprom.bin from the TDATA folder. This is the key you need to lock hard drives to your specific Xbox.
Download a specific Xbox maintenance Linux-based LIVE CD and burn it.
Turn off your computer, and connect your new Xbox HD to your computer as the first IDE hard drive.
Boot from the CD, it should give you a menu.

From here, there's a process of partitioning the new drive and encrypting it. Look in the PDF.

BEFORE you burn the LIVE CD, there's the option of having the replacement drive filled in with a pre-existing directory structure. I recommend that you make a complete backup of your Xboxs C and E drives and use these as a basis for the LIVE CD. After you've done all that, you can put the hard drive in your Xbox and it'll work. You may have to do the entire soft mod process again.

Replacing your hard drive gives you the option of having all the space > 10gb made into an F partition (up to 120GB). After that, it goes into a G partition, but that sometimes doesn't work.

I had to replace the hard drive in my Xbox after it started clicking. Without the eeprom.bin backed up in advance, I wouldn't be able to replace it.

Hmm, sounds pretty confusing tbh but at least it can be done

I don't see the point doing so with a 500gb drive on tap though.

I just purchased my third 2 terrabyte drive. Eeks.

Are new IDE hard disks still being manufactured for the time being? Was worried the format had been abandoned already in favour of SATA.

Ebuyer says yes, but if you're going to put an IDE hard drive into an Xbox, you'd probably want it to be one of the ones on the compatibility list. New ones aren't likely to be there. (But they may be.)