This is not your average problem. I wouldn't be here if I thought I could do this on my own. So I recently acquired a broken XBOX from a friend of mine in payment for some work I did for him as a favor. He was the one who broke it (smashing it and jumping up and down on it does that) well surprisingly he only damaged the DVD-ROM drive. The HDD worked and had been previously softmodded to have UnleashX on it by me. So I was like, hey I'll download emulators, games, movies and stuff and just play em off the HDD. And for a while this was fine. Till one day I decided, I like XBMC more. I was copying the "default.xbe" file for it to the dashboard folder, and it was the only file in that folder at the time. The rest was in the C partition, now I accidentally clicked default.xbe and it tried to start XBMC. But without any other files but XBMC it quickly crashed. I restarted it and I got the same error message over and over about a network cable. Now, I'd also been wanting to install a bigger HDD to hold more games. So I had acquired a little 10GB HDD just so I could play around with the whole add a bigger HDD drive. And I figured now would be a great time to figure it out. I would like to know first if I could mount the XBOX HDD and explore the files and then just fix it, or if thats not possible somehow install a bigger HDD.... without a DVD-ROM drive.... Sorry for wall of text.
If you have an eeprom reader, you can do what ever you want! You can hotswap and probably a few other ways too! My tutorials should guide you through the different processes
Yes, you have to hotswap out the old drive and then use your PC to build a new one. But as above this is only if you already (which everyone should) have a back up of your EEPROM file on your PC. If not you have to build an EEPROM reader as chunkhead mentioned. Or of course you could just install a mod chip and then swapping out the hard drive is simple, take one out and slap a new one in. Then use an auto installer like Slayer to format and install programs. But in order to do all that you need a working DVD drive. If you want my personal opinion you should just fix the whole thing up now while you opening it. Get a new DVD drive and install it, get a modchip (solderless if you like) and install that as well. Then install the new hard drive which i would say should be no less then 160GB in size.
Thanks for the help, I'm going to try it today. steimy: Thanks for the advice, but I'm trying to make this cheap as possible, I looked at new DVD-ROM drives cause I knew that would be the simpler route, but I'm poor and a good modchip solderless or not is still above $20 which is a high price range for me, the whole deal is the XBOX was smashed up and broken I'm just reviving it into a zombie.
