Original xbox hdd upgrade

[SonicSlammaster]

Hey there.
I am considering upgrading my xbox hdd to 300 or 500gb. I have a modded xbox with xecuter2 mod chip
couple of questions.

Do i need to upgrade my bios to support the hdd upgrade?

Do i need to format the drive through my pc
from some kind of boot disc?

Does the hdd need to be lockable?

What hdd would you reccommend?

Any information is greatly appreciated. thanks   

[shmokes]

Just about any hard drive will do.  Make sure you get an IDE drive and not a SATA one, of course -- it has to be able to physically attach to the Xbox.  You probably need to update your BIOS to one that will recognize drives bigger than 127 GB.  As usual, you can get it from Xbins.

Personally, my favorite utility for formatting hard drives is a program called AvaNetPrepare.  It's made by the team that makes the Avalaunch dashboard.  You boot to the AvaNetPrepare disc and it will format/prepare your hard drive, and then populate the partitions (C:, E:, F:, G:, etc.) over the network from folders you set up on your PC.  An alternative is to just download one of the many boot CDs out there that will format the drive and populate it with popular programs like dashboards and Xbox Media Center.  I've never used one of these, but they seem like the easiest route and many many people are very happy with them.

Like I say, just about any IDE hard drive will work, but here's a hard drive compatibility chart so you can check whether specific models have been tested to work.

[Hoagie_one]

My xenium chip has the ability to clone a smaller harddrive onto a bigger one for you.  you just power the second drive, hook it up in place of the dvd drive, tell it to go and come back in an hour or so.

maybe you can do that too.

[shmokes]

I've found the software solutions to work better than the ones built into the chips, personally.  If you decide to go that route, though, make sure to pick up a Y adapter for the power adapter, cos both hard drives will have to draw from the same power cable.  The connector on the DVD power cable is not compatible with hard drives.

[SonicSlammaster]

Thanks for the info guys.
Ill probably go with a hdd from that list shmokes provided me, it would be the safer option.
Thanks for the IDE tip.
Ill give it all a try as soon as i get my hdd. Just wanted ta check with people i can trust because ive found it
insainly confusing finding info out there. thanks

[M.Lanza]

You could try out the "Auto Installer Deluxe" disc.

It has all of the utillities you will ever need, and since your xbox is chipped
you can just replace the stock hard drive with the new one and
prepare, format, and install all of the programs you want straight from the
xbox.

[shmokes]

If you don't really want to get into the nuts and bolts of how everything works, I'd definitely go the auto installer route.  But remember, you still (probably) need to update your BIOS first.  If your BIOS can't recognize partitions larger than 127 GB, the auto installer disc isn't going to do the trick.  Even if the auto installer disc will build the larger partitions, which I suspect it won't, your programs won't be able to see them.  So, update your bios first, then use either an auto installer disc or one of the other routes to prep the hard drive.

[SonicSlammaster]

I think i have enough info to go without using AID. Once i get it going i will give AID a try aswell just for the know how sake of it.
One last question though.

If i make a muck up installing the new hdd can it be fixed by simply writing over the previous partition?
Also what about a hdd that has previously had windows on it? Can i just delete the partition n write the new xbox hd cd to it?
Or does the hdd have to be compleatly clean?

[shmokes]

Yeah . . . no worries in either case.  If you don't get it right the first time, you just run the utilities to re-partition/format again.  The process of partitioning/formatting wipes the drive completely clean, so a prior Windows installation won't make a bit of difference.

[Malenko]

www.xbox-scene.com

tons of info and walk throughs there. you might  have an issue with 320 GB+