XBOX 360 Hard Drive Upgrade

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Notes:

This is a fairly straightforward method and is a compilation of the tutorials at titaniumfish and IVC Wiki.

I created this because although their tutorials are great, I was short on sleep and just wanted to get a 120GB HDD in my XBOX 360.

Hardware needed

  • Windows XP PC w/ SATA capabilities.
  • A Western Digital WD1200BEVS Hard Drive.
    • Yes it has to be that model. No I don't know why aside from the ability to rewrite the firmware such that it believes it's a Hitachi 120 GB hard drive as sold by Microsoft. My guess is if you can re-write the firmware of any equally sized hard drive it should work. However working with low-level hardware programming, I know it's not easy and when things go bad, they can go pretty bad.
    • ZipZoomFly sells it (this is where I purchased mine)
    • NewEgg sells it.
  • USB key or floppy (I hope you have a USB key)

Software needed

Steps

You can choose whether or not to follow certain steps. Some are there just to make your life easier or to get this process with over faster.

I have a memory unit for one reason but that one reason saved me a lot of time. My memory unit is solely for me being able to take all my settings and saved games from one place to another. The other major benefit is that I don't have to recover my gamertag whenever I visit someone.

So basically, I believe if you have a memory unit, move all your saved games or profile information over to it. Even your XBOX Live account should go on your memory unit.

Back up / Clean up

If you plan to make a back up of your data you may be interested in the steps here. However, consider this: Your XBOX Live account will have a history regarding what you have purchased and or previously downloaded.

If you have the bandwidth you can just choose to not back anything up. I strongly suggest backing up saved games / profiles as well as the items listed below because those you can't download from XBOX Live or at least not for free.

What you may want to back up

Here is a list of items which you may not be able to attain from XBOX Live and may wish to back up to a Memory Unit (for the most part a 512MB memory unit should suffice for everything):

  • Microsoft had several XBOX Live outages and they gave users a few free games for compensation such as Undertow, Carcassone, etc etc.  You will also want to back those up because XBOX Live doesn't keep track of that aside from "Unknown".
  • Any content which came with your console. The XBOX 360 Halo edition is chock full of these (i.e. themes, gamerpics, etc). A 20 GB hard drive bought in the store also has several music files and videos which you can't attain on XBOX Live. I believe Hexic comes on the 20 GB hard drive and you would normally have to pay for it. *Note: You may or may not be able to move this content - I will try and post my results - however, why not?*

To take a look at your download history (i.e. to figure out what you *need* to back-up) follow these steps:

  1. Sign in to Xbox LIVE with the gamer profile that originally downloaded the content.
  2. Press the silver Guide button on your controller to open the Xbox Guide.
  3. Go to Settings and select Account Management.
  4. Then select Download History.

Alright, now have a memory unit inserted to move data onto:

  1. With the memory unit inserted, select System, Memory.
  2. Highlight the hard drive.
  3. Choose the type of item, then the specific item you want to move to the memory unit.

What you can afford to lose

Now that you have determined what absolutely must stay, let's go onto what we can afford to lose. This sections purpose is to make your drive lean. It will save you a lot of time if you remove items you don't need or use.

  1. Clear out your cache by following this KB article from M$.
  2. Remove any trial games or demos (seriously, it had better be the next Metal Gear Solid for it to stay)
  3. Remove any video or game previews or expired rentals.
  4. Remove the profiles and content from those friends or family members that somehow happened to use your XBOX and saved 5 GB's worth of their data. I have a lot of younger cousins so this shaved off about 2 GB's for me :-)

I went from 2 GB's free to 12.2 after the above steps.

To remove items from your hard drive:

  1. With the memory unit inserted, select System, Memory.
  2. Highlight the hard drive.
  3. Choose the type of item, then the specific item you want to move to the memory unit.

Extract your drive

I would make a video but I think this guy does a great job. Once you have extracted your drive from the case, stop listening to him.

YouTube Guy

Now I chose to also pull out the SATA connector from the shell. I did this because I had a lot more data to backup and had to go back and forth between drives and only had one memory unit.

Anyways, if you can get everything you need, then do not pull out the SATA connector from the case.

Modify hard drive

USB key

Make bootable

    1. Unzip hpflash1.zip and install hpflash1.exe
    2. Unzip win98boot.zip to it's own directory.
    3. Go to Start -> Hewlett Packard Company -> HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool
      1. Device: Ensure you have selected your USB key.
      2. File system: Choose FAT32.
      3. Format options:
        1. Check "Quick Format"
        2. Check "Create a DOS startup disk"
          1. for "using DOS system files located at" click on the button and point it to where you unzipped win98boot. e.g. c:\temp\win98boot
      4. Click "Start".

Copy needed files and applications

  1. Extract 20GB_HDDSS.rar and rename it to 20gb.bin
  2. Extract 60GB_HDDSS.rar and rename it to 60gb.bin
  3. Extract 120GB_HDDSS.rar and rename it to 120gb.bin
  4. Extract hddhackr091.rar
  5. All of the above files should be copied to the root directory of your USB key.

Modify your new drive

  1. Shutdown your system.
  2. Attach your new drive via SATA
    • For me a USB to SATA adaptor did not work.
    • A direct SATA connection worked
    • You may need to enter BIOS and enable Legacy mode or disable AHCI and choose Compatibility.
  3. Start your system and choose your USB key as a boot device.
    • You may need to enter BIOS and enable USB boot capabilities.
    • You may need to use Legacy USB mode.
  4. Depending on the new hard drive size copy the file SIZEgb.bin to hddss.bin.
    • Example: I have a 120 GB drive. At the command prompt I will execute: 
      • copy 120gb.bin hddss.bin*
  5. Now run: 
    hddhackr -f
    • If prompted, enter the number for the correct drive.
  6. If all went well, follow the instructions left for you by the hddhackr application and the instructions below.

Success

All on one Memory Unit

If you already have everything you need and backed up, then just place the new hard drive in the XBOX 360 hard drive casing, screw everything back in, pop it into the 360 and boot up.

You will need the serial number, you can get it from three places. My suggestion is just going through the system menu:

  1. In the Xbox Dashboard. *preferred*
    • The Xbox 360 console serial number is displayed on the System Information screen of the Xbox Dashboard near the top. System Information is the last option on the list of console settings in the System section of the Xbox Dashboard.
  2. Behind the USB port cover on the Xbox 360 faceplate.
    • You have to press the USB port cover down to see the serial number label. To see the serial number clearly, you may have to disconnect any attached USB devices. For more information about the location of the USB port cover, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: 907578 Xbox 360 Description of the Xbox 360 console physical features
  3. On the back of the Xbox 360 console
    • The Xbox 360 console serial number is displayed on the back of your Xbox 360 console, to the right and above the audio-visual (AV) port. Make sure that you remove any discs and turn off the console before you move your Xbox 360 console.

Now to format it:

  1. System -> Memory -> Hard Drive - This is where your serial number comes into play.
  2. Congratulations!  You are the proud new owner of a 120 GB HDD!

Congratulations!

If any of this helped you out please let me know, if it seems confusing feel free to ask questions. devnull@cimmerii.org I do look at it, just not that often.

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