Xbox 360 Hard Drive Upgrade (wd1200bevs)

luke — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 08:33:48 +0000

so i was thinking of getting a 120gb microsoft hard drive for my 360 a while back, but i figured why am i paying 200 bucks for something that probably costs less than half that? so i did some googling and found that some smart people managed to get a certain type of drive (the western digital 1200bevs) to work with their 360!

so i managed to buy 2 of these drives online for $64 each! one for me, one for a friend, split shipping of 10 bucks and its $69 total. bargain! once i had them i could start modding my 360.

about a week later i got my drives. i’ll share the process i used and the experiences i had to get the drive to work in my xbox.

you will need the following applications/tools for this:

hddhackr 0.91 (download)
xplorer360 extreme2 edition (download)
hp flash drive creator (if you dont have a floppy drive like me, download)
windows 98 boot files (to go with the above, download)

i had to take the existing 20gb drive from my xbox and disassemble it. this is fairly easy, i just followed this youtube video, but yeah its pretty basic stuff.
to get the 120gb drive to work, you need to flash it with the hddss.bin file of a legit drive. you’ll need to look for this as im not supposed to put it here as its “copyrighted”… due to not having a floppy drive, i used the win98 boot files and the flash creator (above) to make a bootable usb drive. then just copy hddhackr to a folder in there with your hddss.bin file in it and it should be sweet.
i then got the new 120gb drive and attached it to one of my pc’s sata ports. boot off the usb stick/floppy and used the hddhackr tool to flash the legit .bin file onto the drive. i also made an undo.bin file just in case.
then i put the 120gb drive in my xbox to format it. just connect the drive up as normal and power on the xbox. go to the settings blade and select ‘memory’. mine came up with a drive just saying ‘unformatted’. if you press format you will be asked to give your consoles serial number (so you dont accidently erase your drive i guess?). once you enter that the drive will format.
back at your pc, power it off and connect your 20gb drive to a sata port. use xplorer360 extreme 2 to browse the drive. i had HUGE problems here but i managed to work out a simple way to get this to work. DONT USE A WINDOWS VISTA PC. i tried 3 vista machines and none of them worked using xplorer360. they would get the files off but wouldnt put any files at all back onto the drive. using a windows XP machine, you can drag and drop files to and from your xbox drive. drag all the files in partition 3 to a temporary folder somewhere on your desktop (or anywhere really). i had some problems with a certain file and the “$SystemUpdate” folder that would crash the program. i ended up copying each folder one by one until i eventually found a 0kb .db file that was giving me problems. so i made a new empty text file with the same name in my backed up folder. once that is done, click “Drive > Backup Partition 2″. this will backup the area of your hard drive that you need for playing old xbox games. i dont play them, but yeah, just in case i guess.
by the time your data is copied off the 20gb drive your 120 should be well and truly done formatting. attach the 120gb drive to your sata port and do the same as step 5 but in reverse. restore the partition 2 bin file and then drag and drop your partition 3 files back into partition 3. after i did this, i had to reflash the hddss.bin file back onto it again otherwise the xbox didnt recognise it.
finally, attach the 120gb drive to your xbox. it should come up with all of your content on it. i had a small issue with my profile not signing in to live, so i went into ‘memory’ and deleted my gamer profile (when prompted DONT delete the content). then i went to recover gamertag and after downloading it all again, it worked perfectly!

ive been using the drive for a little over a week now and i can say its perfect. all my save games loaded, all my downloaded content was there, demo’s, etc… so with a little persistence and some work, you can get a $69 drive to work in your 360 and not have to fork out $199 for the legit microsoft one! any comments or questions, just ask

edit (25/11/2008): one thing i have noticed since doing this upgrade. if you do this and you have a forza2 game save, it will no longer work… from what i have read, forza2 (and some other game that i dont own and who’s name escapes me) use some sort of special save that is locked to your hard drive. i tried all number of things from trying to reflash serial numbers and things back to my 120gb, even down to trying to hex edit my forza2 save. but its gone. if you have a forza2 save, you may want to consider getting a memory card and “moving” the save to the memory card and then back again once you have your 120gb working. apparently this should work. i cant guarantee if it will or not but. the new dashboard update came out also and i havent experienced any weird side effects/bannings (yet) and it all seems fine. also another thing to mention is it looks like xplorer360 extreme2 edition will break your 20gb drive. im not sure why but both mine and my mates 20gb drives no longer work in a 360. i found other people online who also had this problem so im not sure if its a widely known issue or not? i only found out when i went to try and gift my forza2 cars to someone so they could gift them back to my new forza2 game save (cause i lost my old one). but… all the data is still readable in a pc with xplorer360.

disclaimer: i take no responsibility for you breaking your new or old hard drive or any content lost while attempting the above. this was only my experience when upgrading my drive. your experience may differ. hopefully it wont. but hey, it might.

i am luke anderson » microsoft

Xbox 360 Hard Drive Upgrade (wd1200bevs)