# Tutorial For Upgrading Xbox 360 From 20gb To 120gb Using WD



## CAPITAL LETTERS (Jan 13, 2009)

This tutorial is my way of giving back to this community for providing all of the information I needed to upgrade my drive. I did the upgrade a few nights ago, going back and forth through various threads, using trial and error, etc. Since I couldn't find a comprehensive step-by-step walkthrough, I decided to go ahead and write one to help out those who may want to do this.

I want to specifically thank roofus and anger, the guys who made Xplorer360, as well as TheSpecialist, the guy who made HDDHackr and also hacked Xplorer360 to play nice with the WD BEVS drive... I also want to thank him for taking the time to explain how to work with these tools, and I also want to thank folks in this thread for documenting what worked and didn't work for them. Most of the steps in this tutorial were gleaned directly from posts in that thread.

This tutorial may be reposted and distributed elsewhere as long as it is not modified and credit is given to the afore-mentioned folks (roofus, anger, TheSpecialist, and those from that thread.)

In this tutorial I will list the exact steps that I followed that led to success. Some of the steps may not be necessary and some may be redundant, but I wanted to be sure to document everything.

Also, this tutorial focuses pretty much just on the software needed and the steps required to make it work. I'm going to assume that you already know how to physically replace the hard drive. If you don't, there are plenty of other tutorials available (such as this one) that will show you how to do it.

Additionally, these steps were written with Windows XP in mind. If you are using a different OS (such as Vista) these steps may not work for you (but they should give you a pretty good idea what to do.)

And finally, the obligatory *disclaimer: you do this at your own risk!* If you end up destroying your 360 hard drive, your shiny new 120GB WD BEVS drive, or your PC I cannot be held responsible, even if you follow these steps to the letter.

Ok, let's get this thing started!
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What you'll need:
hardware:

A PC (duh) with a SATA controller. If your PC is antiquated like mine you'll need an add-on card (I used this one it comes with all the cables you'll need and it's natively recognized by HDDHackr, though be warned it apparently has compatibility issues with some motherboards.)
A Western Digital Scorpio WD1200BEVS 120 GB SATA hard drive 
A Floppy boot disk (go here for disk images, I used a Windows 98SE OEM boot disk. You could probably also use a bootable flash drive or a zip disk or something as long as the media is writable under DOS) 
A Xbox 360 w/ a 20GB hard drive (duh)

software:

HDDHackr
Xplorer360 Beta 6
Xplorer360 'extreme build 2' (you may be able to just use this hacked version and not need the Beta 6 version at all... you may also be able to skip some of the steps in this tutorial thanks to this version, which I will note.)
Winhex (needed for verification purposes) 
Hex Workshop (needed unless you have a registered version of Winhex.)
A hddss.bin dumped from a retail 360 120GB hdd (I'm not linking to one because they contain copyrighted code. You're smart, I'm sure you can find some way to get ahold of one.)

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The Steps:

Copy HDDHackr.com and the hddss.bin file to your bootable floppy disk.
Turn off your PC, connect the WD BEVS drive, and boot the PC up on the floppy (I also disconnected my PC's hard drive just to be safe.)
At the command prompt type "hddhackr -f" and hit enter. Follow through the prompts and be sure to create an undo file when asked.
When it's finished, reboot on the floppy again. Run "hddhackr -f" again and it will tell you if the drive will be compatible with your 360 or not.
Turn off your PC, disconnect the WD BEVS, and disconnect your 20GB drive from your 360. Disassemble the casing, and remove the 20GB drive. Hook the WB BEVS up to the connector and plug it into the 360. You're going to have to unhook the drive and pull it out again so I'd recommend not completely reassembling the casing... I just put one screw in to hold the drive in.
Turn on your 360, goto the system blade, "console settings", and "system info." Jot down the serial number, you'll need it in the next step.
Go back to the system blade, goto "memory" and you should have the option to format the drive. It will ask for the serial number, type it in and send it flying. (if it says "no device detected" something is wrong. Check the connections.)
While it's formatting go ahead and hook the 20GB hard drive up to your PC. Boot up into Windows, create a folder on your desktop called "xbox" and run Xplorer360 Beta 6 (you may also be able to use the "extreme build 2" version.)
Within Xplorer360 click "Drive" then "Open" then "Hard Drive or Mem Card". It should take a few seconds and then pop up some partitions in the left hand window. (If it doesn't detect the drive, check the connections and also make sure that your SATA controller driver is properly installed.)
Click on Partition 03, select all the items in the right hand window, and drag and drop them to the folder you created on your desktop. If you get errors you'll have to open task manager (ctrl-alt-del) and manually kill the program... reopen the program and drag and drop the folders one at a time. When you find the problem folder create a subfolder in the xbox folder on your desktop with the same name as the problem folder, go into the problem folder and copy the folders/files in there one at a time. You may have to do this a few times, creating folders within folders. For me the problem file was a 0kb .db file within the compatibility folder under a few subfolders. I couldn't get the file to copy so I just created a blank text file and renamed it to the exact name of the file (it was st.db or something like that.) Once the copy starts going it will probably take awhile, depending on how much data you have... so take a break.
Close Xplorer360 and run the Xplorer360 "extreme build 2" hack. Open the drive like you did in step 9 and choose the "backup partition 2" option to dump the second partition to a bin file (named part2.bin or something like that.) It should create a 262MB file.
Shutdown the PC and disconnect the 20GB drive. By this time the 360 should be done formatting the drive, so turn it off and disconnect the 120GB drive. Hook it up to the PC and boot up to Windows.
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Now for the "tricky" (and possibly unnecessary) parts. If you are using the "extreme build 2" hack of Xplorer 360 some or all of the steps in this section may not be required... I don't know for sure. I did the steps exactly as I'm going to show here and it worked for me.
Open up Hex Workshop. Click "Options" and "Preferences." On the "Layout" tab in the "Rows" section uncheck the "Fit to Window" box and ensure the Bytes/Row is set to 16. This isn't necessary but it makes the next steps easier.
Click "Disk" then "Open Drive", change the "Select" drop down to Physical Disks and locate your 120GB drive. Be sure you select the correct drive or this could potentially cause catastrophic problems.
This is the potentially tricky part. You need to get to byte 80000 in hex, but Hex Workshop doesn't let you go to a specific byte offset on drives, only to a specific sector. Assuming the sector size of your drive is the same as mine, or 512 decimal bytes (which I can't think of any reason why it wouldn't be,) the sector you should have to goto is 400 (hex.) You do this by clicking "Edit" then "Goto", typing 400 in the "Offset" field and choosing "Beginning of Drive" in the "From Where" section. If the sector size is different for some reason, you'll have to do a little math to get to the right offset (here's my math, just to give you an idea... 0x80000 is 524288 in decimal. 524288/512 (the sector size) is 1024, 1024 is 400 in hex. You could probably do all the math in hex, but I'm not good at hex math so I convert to decimal.)
You should see a bunch of columns numbered 0-F, and they should all have "00" in them. If they have anything else in them you are either working with the wrong drive or you are at the wrong offset, don't change anything! Otherwise change the columns as follows:

58 54 41 46 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 10 00 00 00 01

And save by clicking the disk icon or clicking "File" and "Save"
Leaving Hex Workshop open, open up Winhex and either goto offset 80000 or do a search for the word "XTAF." Verify that starting at byte 80000 you see the string above (58 54 41 46, etc.) If you do see the string, go on to the next step. If you don't then you need to back to Hex Workshop and undo your changes, and then find the correct offset to make the changes to. If you are lucky enough to have a registered copy of Winhex or another hex editor that lets you goto a specific byte, you can simply navigate to byte offset 0x80000 and make the changes. The shareware version of Winhex does not allow you to save though.
Within Hex Workshop open Xplorer360.exe (the beta 6 version, not the "extreme build 2" version.) I'm assuming that this change already exists in the "extreme build 2" version so you can probably skip this step, but I'm including it because I did this. Goto offset F0C2 (hex) where you will find the following values:

68 77 03

change them to:

00 C2 1A

Save the file. You will be prompted to make a backup, which is always a good idea.
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The rest of these steps fall are most definitely "necessary".
Load Xplorer360 beta 6 version (you can probably use the "extreme build 2" version, but I don't know for sure) and open the 120GB drive like you did with the 20GB drive in step 9. If the drive won't open or it opens but you can't access the partitions then something isn't right, go back and check your work.
Expand Partition 03 and copy all of the data from the xbox folder you created on your desktop. This will take awhile depending on how much data you have, so take another break.
Close Xplorer360 Beta 6 and open the "extreme build 2" version. Open the drive, then select "restore partition 2", select the 262mb bin file you made in step 11 (part2.bin.) Once it completes, your drive is ready!

Now, Shutdown your PC, pop the 120GB drive into your 360 enclosure. It's probably a good idea to only partially assemble it so you can test it. If you hook it up and your 360 boots up and looks like it did on your 20GB, you should be done! 

You may want to check your XBL connection and ensure your XBLA games and other DLC works. You might also verify that your original XBox games still work, and check a game save or two just to make sure nothing is corrupted. Then turn off your 360, reassemble your drive, hook it back up, fire up your 360, and bask in the knowledge that you spent $70 and about an hour (of work time, not data-copying time) instead of $180 to upgrade your 360 from 20GB to 120GB.


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## Mark7805 (Jan 14, 2009)

sick stuff. Thanks. Will probably try it when I get the time


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## alexp999 (Jan 14, 2009)

Isnt this hacking and against all things MS?
Nice guide, but I'm not sure if the mods will allow it.


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## btarunr (Jan 14, 2009)

alexp999 said:


> Isnt this hacking and against all things MS?
> Nice guide, but I'm not sure if the mods will allow it.



Tis as good/legal as soft-modding graphics cards. I'll let it pass. Don't be cautioned by the word "hack". Not all "hacks" are malicious. In this case, you're just expanding storage. The only implication is where MS expects you to pay more for its "genuine" HDD upgrades.


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## Thermopylae_480 (Jan 14, 2009)

It'll void your warranty. You can't legitimately RMA after such changes, that's the only issue.  You can change things all you want if you don't care about that.


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## 1Kurgan1 (Jan 14, 2009)

Nice guide, I don't personally own a 360, but was thinking of swapping the HDD in my PS3. From what I heard it just needed to be a notebook HDD, not any specific models. I would think this would hold true for the 360 also, if so Fujitsu has a 160GB for $10 less on newegg, looking at that I might need that for my PS3


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## WarEagleAU (Jan 14, 2009)

Dude thanks for this. With the Hddhackr 0.91 you can do any of the BEVS series from WD (RST, UST, etc). I have the bin and I flash it but when I reboot I get the devices do not match ID, even though they do. Ive yet to take apart my shell and replace it and go from there, but I thank you for the guide.


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## erocker (Jan 14, 2009)

I would like a tutorial like this on replacing the DVD drive.


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## WarEagleAU (Jan 14, 2009)

That is easy. hell erocker you can google the info on it. However you may want to buy the part from like Divineo.com or something like that just an FYI.


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## kenkickr (Jan 14, 2009)

I hate to burst bubbles but this is 1:1 from xbox-scene.com.  http://forums.xbox-scene.com/index.php?showtopic=660096

This is for you Erocker, http://www.360-hq.com/xbox-tutorials-61.html


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## WarEagleAU (Jan 14, 2009)

I know


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## kenkickr (Jan 14, 2009)

Didn't mean anything by it, I just thought others would like to know.


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## WarEagleAU (Jan 14, 2009)

Oh not like that Ken my Cubs brother..I noticed it too but hell I just didnt want to say anything. Perhaps he can help me with my Device ID not matching :Roll:


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## kenkickr (Jan 14, 2009)

Tonight, I have to go upstairs to my friends and figure out why his Xbox keeps kicking him out of certain maps and yesterday started freezing on them.  I need to see what type of freezing is going on(Graphics or connection freeze).  Also him and his wife talked to bungie about the issue and they are saying it's a problem with the optic drive.


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## WarEagleAU (Jan 14, 2009)

ouch


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## kenkickr (Jan 14, 2009)

Yeah, that's what I thought when his wife called me this morning to tell the freezing crap started.  Luckily if the freezing is hardware I have some friends at Menards(hardware store) that can give me a discount on some hardware.


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## WarEagleAU (Jan 14, 2009)

Yeah that is good. If its OPtics, I think you can look on Divineo.com. Its where I got all my 360 stuff for Uhm, the special project I did.


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## kenkickr (Jan 14, 2009)

They actually have some damn good prices! Thanks!  Is there anyway I could see this special project(closes eyes and rubs hands together devilishly).


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## WarEagleAU (Jan 14, 2009)

Well you know what I did, I just cant say it


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## DaveK (Jan 15, 2009)

I need to try this, it's just wrong buying a 120GB 360 hard-drive that's more expensive than a 1TB drive for a PC. Anyway, yeah I'm in need of storage, it's a pain having to keep deleting installed games to install another, most of the time I can only fit 1 game on the drive or 2 smaller games.

Anyone actually know what takes up 8GB on the 20GB drive? I wish I could get rid of whatever it is.


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## alexp999 (Jan 15, 2009)

DaveK said:


> I need to try this, it's just wrong buying a 120GB 360 hard-drive that's more expensive than a 1TB drive for a PC. Anyway, yeah I'm in need of storage, it's a pain having to keep deleting installed games to install another, most of the time I can only fit 1 game on the drive or 2 smaller games.
> 
> Anyone actually know what takes up 8GB on the 20GB drive? I wish I could get rid of whatever it is.



20GB hardrive becomes about 18GB usable space, then the other 6GB is used for caching and the Original Xbox Emulator  iirc.


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## JC316 (Jan 15, 2009)

Thats very interesting. Question though, does it have to be that specific hard drive, or can it be any Sata drive?


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## WarEagleAU (Jan 15, 2009)

IT has to the be the WD BEVS series. It is the only one that works with HDDHackr 0.91. (before this it had to be the LAT version of the WD BEVS series, now it can be any of them, LAT, RST or UST).

And my 20GB is about 14GB useable. It is system files, emulation, etc.


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## JC316 (Jan 15, 2009)

WarEagleAU said:


> IT has to the be the WD BEVS series. It is the only one that works with HDDHackr 0.91. (before this it had to be the LAT version of the WD BEVS series, now it can be any of them, LAT, RST or UST).
> 
> And my 20GB is about 14GB useable. It is system files, emulation, etc.



Ah, ok. I can't believe that M$ has the balls to ask so much for the damned 120GB HD anyway. They should have at least given us the option of adding ANY Sata drive.


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## Mark7805 (Jan 15, 2009)

Wait so this still works right? lol I'm confused.


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## JC316 (Jan 15, 2009)

Mark7805 said:


> Wait so this still works right? lol I'm confused.



Yes, it works, but you have to have that specific hard drive in order to make it work.


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## DaedalusHelios (Jan 15, 2009)

WarEagleAU said:


> Yeah that is good. If its OPtics, I think you can look on Divineo.com. Its where I got all my 360 stuff for Uhm, the special project I did.



I had to do a charge back to devineo because I used mod original xboxes through my early college years and they short changed me. 

I ordered 20 Xecutor modchips from them and they sent me 6. That was back when those chips were $60 or so each. I was pissed and did a charge back because over the phone they said I was lying. I wanted to do more than a charge back.


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## Apocolypse007 (Jan 15, 2009)

here is a similar guide from PC world. A bit more credible source...

http://www.pcworld.com/article/150970/upgrade_your_xbox_360s_hard_drive_on_the_cheap.html

edit: it seems the comments after the article point to the original article in post 1. Must be how it was found.


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## CAPITAL LETTERS (Jan 15, 2009)

Mark7805 said:


> Wait so this still works right? lol I'm confused.



yeah works still 100%.
even with the new xbox 'operating system'


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