Xbox Open Heart Surgery

Well, today was truly a successful day!

To fill you in before you read any further, please skim through this topic I had posted on Xbox-Scene.

Done? Then let's begin.

Mike Cook was on my bus today, that's basically a way of saying he's coming over (which I do enjoy!) He had known about my problem and he even tried getting started with me a while back, but we didn't have the right screws =(

Lucky for me, he pulled out his shiny screws, hundreds, even thousands*! He had brought that and his handy-dandy; Screwdriver!
*More like 40 screws total.

When we came home, we got straight to work. We spent time unscrewing the Xbox and once it was fully done, we peeked around inside. There was a Western Digital HDD and the CD/DVD drive that was inside of it, so after discussing why that drive wasn't unusually large, we got to work on opening up our computer (if you don't know what we're doing right now, go back and read the forum topic again and click the link that takes you to the Hotswapping FAQ, just read the first question in there and you'll be up-to-date.)

Now, after the first attempt, we booted our Xbox, got the error message, then swapped IDE cables. We opened Xplorer360.exe and it said it couldn't find any FATX drives! (That's the format all Xbox HDD's are in.) That really crushed our spirits.

But, I went for another attempt and tried it a bit more faster then what we did before. I tried opening Xplorer360.exe and what did you know! It showed my partitions! This, meaning I could put files on my Xbox and lucky enough for me, Barhum let me borrow his modded Xbox, which I used to get a nice, clean backup of the C drive.

So after adding in the C drive, I booted the Xbox and it worked!

I'm very pleased with it, I went through and deleted all the gamesaves, just to make sure nothing could be traced back to my old modded ways.

So now I have a nice, clean, working Xbox! Soon, I'll be trying to get my gamertag (NessDan) onto my original Xbox. That way, when Alex is playing Call of Duty 4, I can go back in time and play some Halo 2... Good times...

Anyways, that was my day and I'm really glad at how much of a success it was. Click the links below to view the pictures of our little adventure!


Mike, Alex, and ... 1/3 of Me

How the Setup Looks Like

The overview


Give credit where credit is due!
Big Thanks To...
The Xbox-Scene Forums
Bomber Bloke. The most contributing member from Xbox-Scene (Thanks so much man!)
Mike, Thanks for the hands-on help! (He's just a normal, everyday, superhero that hacks.)
Barhum, Thanks for your Xbox(s)! (I only needed 1!!! Thanks a bunch!)