Tutorial written by : Sandman

Important: This document is outdated.
It is only kept online for historical reasons.

Section II : Replacing the original Hard drive on the XBOX

Note: This section assumes you have completed “Section I” of this guide before attempting this section, otherwise, stop now.

This section will cover the following items:

Ø Preparing the new hard drive for use in the XBOX using your PC
Ø Running Evolution-x from the cd-rw
Ø Setting up the network address in Evolution-x
Ø Connecting to the XBOX via FlashFXP
Ø Backing up the original XBOX hard drive
Ø Copying the Evolution-x dashboard to the XBOX hard drive

Hardware required for this section:

Ø XBOX
Ø PC DVD drive (Liteon’s tend to work the best for me)
Ø Torx driver (I use a T10 and T15, the T10 for opening the XBOX Cover, and the T15 for removing the hard drive)
Ø Crossover cable if connecting directly to the pc
Ø Standard LAN cable (CAT5) if connecting to a hub
Ø Television with at least RCA Jacks (so we can see what we are doing)
Ø Original XBOX game
Ø CD-RW with the Evolution-X burned on it (must be a cd-rw as cd-r’s don’t seem to work for me)
Ø Standard Y power cable (usually found in your pc, if you don’t have one you can buy them for about 3 dollars at the local RadioShack)

Software Required for this section:

Ø Xhdprepa 1.3 (the latest current version)
Ø FlashFXP

Procedures:

1) Preparing the new hard drive: With the power to the PC turned off, place the new hard drive into an available bay inside the PC tower. Connect an available data cable as well as an available molex power connector to the drive. With the power and data cables connected, start your PC, once Windows has finished loading, open the “xhdprepa” program, you will see the hard drives listed on the left side, hightlight the desired drive (the one you are going to put in the xbox) by left clicking on it once (NOTE: be VERY careful because if you choose the wrong drive, you will destroy Windows). On the right side of that screen you should see a checkbox labeled “Zeroing” with options in the form of radio buttons under that, choose click the radio button labeled “Only 1st 4096 bytes” and click on the “Prepare” button. It will ask you if you are sure, click “OK”. This should take approx. 10-30 seconds (beats the snot out of 24 hours doesn’t it J ). After it has completed, close the “xhdprepa” program. You can now shut down windows and remove the new hard drive as it is ready to put in the XBOX.

2) Opening the XBOX: Turn the XBOX upside down, there are six screws that need to be removed in order to open the console, one under each rubber foot (in each corner of the unit), and one under two of the three stickers (one at the front and one at the back of the unit, directly in the middle). Remove these six screws. Once the screws are out, turn the XBOX over and gently lift the top away from the bottom half (this will be tight so apply pressure without being barbaric).

3) Backing up the original XBOX hard drive: Follow steps 2 through 8 from “Section I” of this guide, the only difference will be, you want to transfer the entire contents of the “C” and “E” drive from your XBOX to your PC so that you will be able to transfer them to the new hard drive. Once the contents from drive “C” and “E” have been copied to your PC, you can now disconnect from the FTP and turn the XBOX off.

4) Replacing the XBOX hardrive: With the PC DVD drive still attached, remove the original XBOX hard drive by unscrewing the two screws in the black plastic tray that holds it to the XBOX shell, once these have been removed, you will see two screws on each side of the black plastic tray, remove these as well. After that has been done, place the new hard drive in the tray and replace the four screws we just took out and put the tray back in the XBOX. Plug the data cable from the original XBOX hard drive into the new hard drive. Take the standard Y power connectorthat was used in the original hard drive and plug it into the new hard drive. We are now ready to plug the XBOX in and boot it up.

5) Connecting the XBOX cables: Plug the power cable from the wall into the connector in the back of the XBOX, plug in the video cable from the television into the video port, plug a controller into the controller port, and last but not least, plug in the Crossover cable (if connecting directly to the pc) or the CAT5 cable (if connecting through a hub). Once all the cables are connected as they should be, turn the unit on by pressing the power button (the small grey button in the front of the XBOX). When it boots up, you will probably get the red/green flashing error, don’t worry about that (assuming again that your modchip was working BEFORE we did any of this).

6) Loading the Evolution-X dashboard for the first time: After the XBOX has powered up, it will load the Evolution-X dashboard (providing you left the cd-rw in the PC DVD drive and the original game in the original XBOX DVD drive), if it doesn’t don’t worry, you may have to do it two or three times (three seems to be my lucky number).

7) Editing the network settings in Evolution-X: Once at the main menu, you will see: “Network” menu item, scroll down using your D-pad on your controller and press the “A” button once the “Network” menu option has been highlighted. This will open the network setting screen, make sure that the two ips are still the same as before (for the static ip:192.168.000.002, and for the gateway:192.168.000.001), if they have returned to all zero’s you will need to make the appropriate changes. Once you have verified both ips are set correctly, press the “Back” button (the black button in the left-middle of the controller) If they were already set, then you are ready to connect to the XBOX via FlashFXP, if they returned to zero’s, you will need to reboot the XBOX in order for the changes to take affect.

8) Connecting to the XBOX via FLASHFXP: Once the XBOX has rebooted and is at the Evolution-X screen again, turn on your PC, when Windows has finished loading, you will need to set the static ip of the PC to: 192.168.0.1 (I am assuming you are able to do this, if not please refer to refer to Windows help for more details). After you have changed the ip of your PC to the correct static ip, load up FlashFXP on your PC, After that has loaded, press the “F4” key on your keyboard. This will open the site manager, select the site we created from Section I and click the “connect” button. If you have done everything according to this guide, you should now see the drives on the XBOX in the window on the right side.

9) Formatting the XBOX partitions: In order to format the partitions on the new drive, we need to do a couple of RAW commands (two commands a few times each), these commands are as follow: Formatpath \Device\Harddisk0\Partitionx (x being the partition number according to Evolution-X under the “harddisk” menu option. In order to do this RAW command, click on the “Commands” menu option, then on the sub-menu, click on the menu option labeled “RAW Command (Quote)”, this will open a small screen requesting the raw command. Enter the previously mentioned command (Formatpath \Device\Harddisk0\Partitionx). Once you do this, you will receive a key in the lower right window (the window that tells you how fast something transferred and if it is finished etc.). Copy that key and enter the next raw command: Formatdrive key (key being the key that you copied from the window in the lower right) (Note: there will be a list of all partitions at the end of this section). Some people say you only have to do partition6, but just to be safe, I like to do them all, the only downside to this approach is, it will take about five minutes instead of one. Once you have formatted all the partitions correctly, you can then reboot your XBOX (with the Evolution-X cd-rw still in the PC DVD drive), once the Evolution screen comes up, you can then copy the original “C” and “E” drives back over from the PC to the XBOX (the ones we grabbed while the original hard drive was still in the XBOX).

10) Replacing the original Dashboard: Once the “C” and “E” drives have completed copying over, you will want to replace the original dashboard if you haven’t already. To do this, log into your XBOX via FlashFXP and double click on the directory labeled “C”. Look for “xboxdash.xbe”, you will want to back this up (again, this is ONLY if you haven’t done this from “Section I” of this guide). Right click in the window and click on the menu option labeled “Make Folder”, this will open a small screen requesting the folder name you want to create, enter whatever you like. When you are finished naming it, click the “OK” button, this will then create the new folder on the “C” drive of your XBOX. Find the “xboxdash.xbe” and transfer it from the XBOX to your PC, once it has been transferred, double click on the new directory (the one you just created), while in the new directory, transfer the “xboxdash.xbe” to the XBOX. This will give you a backup on the XBOX in case you need to go back for some reason. After the file has finished transferring, go back to the root of the “C” drive by double clicking on the “Parent Directory” link at the top of the window on the right. Right click on the “xboxdash.xbe” and click on rename, this will ask you what you would like to change the filename to, type “msxboxdash.xbe” and leave it right where it’s at.

11) Copying Evolution-X to the XBOX hard drive: After you have finished renaming the “xboxdash.xbe” to “msxboxdash.xbe”, double click on the link at the top of that window that is labeled “parent directory” and double click on the “D” drive. You will see the “default.xbe”, transfer this file to your PC and rename it to “xboxdash.xbe”, when it has been renamed, double click on the “parent directory” link again so that you can change back to the “C” drive. After you have changed directories to the “C” drive, you can now transfer your new “xboxdash.xbe” file over to the XBOX, it will prompt you to overwrite, click on the button labeled “Overwrite”. Once this is done, you will want to copy the menu.ini file over to the XBOX as well (so that your menu items will work correctly), this file can be found inside the Evolution-X rar file you downloaded. When the “Menu.ini” file has been transferred over to the XBOX, you can now disconnect from the FTP and turn the XBOX off.

12) Finishing touches: After the XBOX has been turned off, you can now disconnect the data and power cable from the PC DVD drive and plug the data cable back into the original XBOX DVD drive. Unplug the molex power cable from the hard drive, disconnect the Y adapter from the XBOX power source and plug the XBOX power source into the hard drive. Screw the two screws into the tray (the two that secure the tray to the rest of the XBOX) and replace the cover (obviously you will also want to screw the six screws back into the bottom of the case before you move it). Providing you have followed these steps in this section of the guide, you SHOULD now have an XBOX with a larger hard drive.

List of RAW commands in accordance to the partitions:

Ø Formatpath \Device\Harddisk0\Partition1
Ø Formatdrive key (the key given by the FTP)

Ø Formatpath \Device\Harddisk0\Partition2
Ø Formatdrive key (the key given by the FTP)

Ø Formatpath \Device\Harddisk0\Partition3
Ø Formatdrive key (the key given by the FTP)

Ø Formatpath \Device\Harddisk0\Partition4
Ø Formatdrive key (the key given by the FTP)

Ø Formatpath \Device\Harddisk0\Partition5
Ø Formatdrive key (the key given by the FTP)

Ø Formatpath \Device\Harddisk0\Partition6
Ø Formatdrive key (the key given by the FTP)