January 26, 2007Hddhacker v0.5B Released
Posted by greg
The Specialist has released a tool enabling you to use HDD’s on your 360 which have not been “certified” by Microsoft. Hddhacker v0.5B is specifically written for the Western Digital BEVS series — for the moment it won’t work with anything else. And due to certain limitations you may only use a 20GB drive, at least until Microsoft includes support for larger disks.
How it works:
x360 HDD’s contain information on sector 16 about the HDD: the HDD serial number, the model, the firmware version and the size in sectors is stored here. The x360 asks the HDD to identify itself, by sending an ‘IDENTIFY DEVICE’ ATA to the HDD. It will compare the returned information to the info that is stored on sector 16. This information on sector 16 is signed and thus can not be changed. This tool will mod the FW from the WD HDD to comply with the information on sector 16, so that the ‘identify’ information will match the information on sector 16 and your x360 will accept the HDD as valid.
Very nifty!
How to use:
Get yourself a Western Digital SATA BEVS HDD. Copy sectors 16 - 22 (7 sectors) from a valid x360 HDD to the Western Digital. Then, boot to dos (not a dos box from windows) and run this application. Make sure that you have ONLY this Western Digital drive connected to your sata controller, have the other devices disconnected. Then follow the instructions on screen. Keep in mind that you have to start the utility from a writable path if you want to create an ‘undo’ file (it will save it to the path you’ve started the tool from). Make sure that you have FIRST copied the sectors 16-22 onto the drive, BEFORE using this tool ! The tool will need that info on sector 16, otherwise it doesn’t know how to mod your FW.
After the tool has flashed your drive, turn off your computer, wait a few seconds, restart your computer and re-run the tool. The tool will tell you then whether the whole thing was successful.
Download: Hddhacker v0.5B
- source: maxconsole
yay 1st comment, this is sweet though…
What if your running XP and your pc doesn’t have dos?
lol, almost every windows release has dos to my knowledge.
xp still has a form of dos available by start menu -> run and type cmd then enter
too complicated rite now…will wait until 500gb hardrive support and an easier way to to it…lol
still a 20gb hdd
come on with a 750 gig hd
To #’s 2 & 3 above…
The instructions state NOT to use the DOS BOX (CMD.EXE) built into Windows.
If you have Windows just get yourself a DOS boot disk (use Google) and boot of of that. Good luck! Too bad it only works on 20GB.