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Tuesday 6 July 2004

XBox woot! bah! [drdave]

Decided I needed a bigger hard drive for my xbox over the weekend.
So with a little rearrangement, I liberated an 80Gb drive from my desktop. Ripped the xbox apart, replaced the hard drive (very easy operation), put it back together (very difficult operation) and turned on. Everything seemed to be working fine... went to the mod chip dashboard, could still ftp to it, would do all the mod chip stuff, like play emus, movies, nicked games.
Anyway, after watching a movie, I decided to check that the legit stuff was still working. Put a DVD in the drive, tried to boot...
Was greeted by a screen that said 'Error 5: Your Xbox Needs Servicing'.
Bugger. Couldn't get to the MS dashboard no matter what I did, couldn't get onto Live. So I had a scoot around on the net. Error 5 means that the hard drive isn't locked. See, apparently, the MS bios requires that the IDE drive is in a locked state - which is a function that most new IDE drives have, that they require a unique password to unlock and be read. If the drive is not locked, the xbox assumes its been tampered with and won't do bugger all.
No problem I thought, I'll just lock the drive... seems there are tools to do it. When I try to lock the drive, it tells me that the drive does not support locking. Arse. This old Maxtor is apparently one of the only Maxtors that doesn't.
So now I have three choices:
1) Leave as is. The only thing I lose is Live. I can still do most everything else, including playing original games - albeit through the mod chip bios;
2) Put the old drive back - ugh, 8Gb...;
3) Buy a new IDE drive that supports locking.

At the moment, I'm sticking with option 1)... to be honest, I haven't used Live in ages. In fact, before I got the ability to play Outrun in arcade perfect style, I never used my Xbox for ages! And I don't really fancy shelling out for another 50 quid drive.
So woot! for the extra storage. Bah! for the loss of features!

3 comments:

  1. XBMC has got some KAI jiggery-pokery(TM) in it to play system link games on line. Although it dosen't support the latest version yet. Should rock when it does. www.xboxlink.co.uk

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  2. The Evox dashboard has a setting to lock the harddrive, this might work better than some of the other tools out there. Might work, I've used it on different brands, including Maxtor, drives.

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  3. Nope, tried that. No worries though... I've ordered a Samsung one which is reportedly lockable. That should get me back on live...
    In the end I figured that I really wanted to take FSW out into the real world. That xlink functionality in xbmc looks good though... does it work with emulators? Anyone fancy trying to get some 4 player gauntlet going?

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