upgraded hard drive doesn't boot

[dhbh]

I have softmodded my xbox using sid 4 and went great. I purchased a new harddrive western digital 160 gig that is lockable. went throught the process of ftping all c drive eeprom file and e drive. used nero to make a bootable dvd. on pc i booted dvd and went through the process of installing a new hard drive. everything went great and locked drive at the end. The problem i am having is that when i plug the new drive in my xbox it does not boot, just says contact xbox support in green letters full screen of contacting xbox support. I am stuck any resolution would be greatly appreciated...

[digitalhigh]

Did you check and re-check the key you used to lock your HDD with? And are you certain that it's the key for the xbox you're installing it in? Odds are something went wrong with the locking process...

[dhbh]

when i locked the drive the key info came up from the eeprom.bin file. and everthing looked good. Is there something special to look for. Another question should i select generate hd key in the hdm menu (item number 6).

[digitalhigh]

If you generated the eeprom.bin file as directed, then the key should be good. Are you certain that the drive locked properly? With some hard drives, even if it says they're lockable, it takes a bit of mucking about to get the lock to actually work. For example, with one computer, I had to boot it with the HDD attached, and then disconnect the power cable and reconnect it. I'd check the drive from your PC using atapwd and make sure that it's locked, and that you can unlock it using the key from your eeprom.

[dhbh]

I'll check it out, thanks alot. Alos I read about the program call ed "configmagic" to extract the eeprom. Is that necessary since I already have the backed up eeprom file?

[digitalhigh]

No, not necessicary.

[dhbh]

Everything looks good and it say's that is is locked, i verified that and then unlocked it and relocked it. I was wondering if i need only copy the "c" drive and not the "E" drive. any other way to upgrade the hard drive that anyone is aware of after softmodding. Also how many files should be on the "c" drive??

[digitalhigh]

I'm not sure about the exact number of files that should be on the C drive.

Dur...

I know.

There is a special sector of the hard drive that has to be zeroed out...it's one of the ways the xbox determines that it's a valid hard drive. You need a program like Norton Ghost to clone the HD. At least, that's how I did it. If you use the DOS version, you can have it do a RAW read from the original drive to the replacement. Obviously, you'll have to connect and unlock both HD's, clone them, and then lock both of them again.

I'm sorry I didn't think of this sooner...it's been a while since I've done a HD swap. Also, there are probably other methods of zeroing out that particular sector, but Ghost is just the way I've always done it. Good luck.

[dhbh]

thanks alot for the info. I was wondering if the harddrive clone works good in hdm and if that is a option that would work. I have tried to unlock the original xbox hard drive in hdm but it won't unlock it. Does it have to be unlocked some other way?

[digitalhigh]

I couldn't tell you about HDM. I believe that there is a program called HDprepar or something like that that will zero out the appropriate sectors w/o having to do a clone, but it may corrupt existing files (zeroing out sectors = erasing data), so that could be another way of doing things.

To unlock, I always use the app HDUnlock.exe from Xbins. If you need a copy, lemme know, I've prolly got it laying around.

[dhbh]

I can't seem to locate the program, if you could get it to me that would be great, "hdunlock.exe" and also the program called "atapwd.exe" i think i will need also, thanks alot.

I have located the two programs I need so disreguard the last message, thanks again.

[digitalhigh]

ATAPWD: http://www.rockbox.org/atapwd.zip

Try google first. First link.

And HDunlock is attached.

Also, there's an app called UnlockX which may be useful.