I finally got my 250GB hacked drive up and running the past week (after my first enclosure from Deal Extreme went AWOL and I bought another off of a local ebay seller), so I thought I'd post my experiences to help anyone else thinking of doing this.
I followed this guide
here, and it was extremely useful. but there were still teething problems not mentioned there, as follows...
Flashing the drive
This ended up being slightly more difficult than I'd anticipated. I was using my old PC with an Abit IL9 Pro motherboard, and it caused errors detecting the drive in hddhacker. I tried messing with all the IDE compatibility setings etc, but they resulted in the drive being invisible to the program. In the end I set it back to defaults and in desperation tried different SATA ports. Plugging it into the first port then made it work fine! I think this is a common problem, make sure the drive is in the first port on your motherboard or it may not be detected. They also seem to recommend turning off any enhanced SATA stuff, but actually this made the drive NOT work for me - those options had to be
on.
Backing up the old drive with Xplorer360
I was using an official transfer cable to migrate my stuff from the 360 drive to the PC. I didn't want to take apart my old official 120GB drive in case I want to sell it on etc, so transfer rates were hampered slightly by USB speeds, but it was still pretty quick. My aforementioned old machines was running Windows XP and worked flawelessly, from what I read Xplorer doesn't behave well under Vista onwards with UAC really needing to be turned off. For that reason alone
I'd recommend you run Xplorer 360 on a 32bit Windows XP machine only. Oh, it's not mentioned explicitly anywhere in the guide, but you want the EXTRACT command to copy files off the drive.
One important caveat - I'd stuck a spare 1TB drive I was migrating from my NAS in to hold all the Xbox data, which I used as the destination drive in Xplorer 360. Seems sound, BUT Xplorer DOESN'T copy the data straight there. It seems to copy it all to Windows' temp directory and THEN move it across, in the same way e.g. Internet Explorer handles downloads. Luckily I still had enough space on the system drive, but if for example, you are copying across 100GB of data and your system drive only has 20gb of space left, I assume it would fail even if your destination drive does have this much. I'm not sure if there is any smart handling of this. It also meant the process took even longer, as the whopping great file had then to be moved from my system drive to the 1TB drive after being backed up.
Restoring data to the new hard drive
This is where I had the most problems. First of all - it took AGES. Backing up data doesn't take too long, but it seems the program has to do clever stuff when copying it back, so do not expect regular Windows speeds for copying data.
As an example, my 256MB profile took around thirty minutes to restore, and my entire 120GB or so of data took a good ten hours or so constant copying. Another reason why you don't want to run on Vista onwards where freezes are apparently common.
I had the drive running with just the Backwards compatiblity partition (
as mentioned in the post before you MUST copy this off an official MS drive, it is NOT recreated when you format a drive) and my profile and it worked fine, but I realised I had huge amounts of DLC etc for retail games that would take me an age to redownload and even remember what I had, frankly, so I copied my whole games folder. This was a big mistake. Not only did this mean it took hours as mentioned above, but there was a further problem.
Before you copy data from your old drive, DELETE all installed games - they will NOT work on the new drive, the system will detect it is from a different disk and tell you to reinstall them. As it was, copying those huge 9GB game images was nothing but a massive waste of my time. XBLA games are fine of course, I'm talking about retail games.
Oh, another hint using Xplorer 360, the GUI is peculiar, and injecting folders by right clicking on what in Windows would normally be considered the parent folder does NOT work properly. The guy explains how to do it in the guide, but I didn't pay attention and copied my profile to the wrong place as a result. The delete function repreatedly crashed the program, so I ended up sticking the drive in the 360 and formatting it again to reclaim the space. Dragging and dropping from Windows into the right hand pane seemed to work well for getting file structure correct (this also apparently doesn't work right in Vista/Win 7 without turning off UAC and/or praying, so another reason to again do all this on an XP machine).
Anyway, the end result was a new drive that so far seems to work flawlessly. In theory it should make things a bit faster as the BEKT is a faster drive than the stock 360 one, and all the contiguous blocks of free space compared to my near-bursting 120GB disk should also help. I haven't been banned or anything (touch wood), and and my old saves all seem to work so far.
The only problem I had was with Xbox1 stuff. The emulator works fine, but my saves seem corrupted. They are there, but e.g. Ninja Gaiden Black shows my save as being "damaged" and won't load it. I only had a few Xbox 1 games which I'd beaten long ago so I'm not bothered, but others might not be too pleased by this. I don't know if this is a common problem or I'm just unlucky, I guess I could try backing them up from my old drive by USB.
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