The Lamer Gamer

Found an article with some quick money saving links for Xbox 360 Do-It-Yourselfers.  http://www.pcworld.com/article/172220/bypass_microsofts_xbox_360_silly_peripheral_prices.html/

Probably nothing that one wouldn’t have figured out already.  Hell, I did the Hard Drive upgrade months ago.

http://www.gamespot.com/news/6227713.html

So with this latest round of upgrades the Xbox moves up to a 250GB internal drive.  Since it was so cheap and easy to hack together an upgrade to 120GB (http://thelamergamer.com/?p=398) I’d expect this to be about the same.

Scary that my 120GB drive has only about 20GB free right now.  I love downloading crap.

It would seem that hacking one’s Xbox is about as addictive as getting tattoos.  Next up, I’m thinking of replacing the fan, cause it’s obnoxiously loud.  Since I can install the games to the HD now that I have all the extra space, it’s the only thing left that’s keeping it from being a reasonable HTPC substitute.  Watching Netflix videos on the 360 is kind of annoying with the added sound effects.

Found a very comprehensive article on replacing the stock fan, and the tools necessary to do so.  Looks more inolved than I would have assumed.
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,2246363,00.asp

I’ve read that the Talismoon kit is surprisingly quiet, but if I’m going to void the full warranty I want to be dead sure about it being dead quiet.  This kit is about $25 so the price is right.
http://www.talismoon.com/cgi-bin/multipage/engine.pl?function=viewid&id=RKS00099&cat=XBOX360-TUNING

I finally got tired of having no storage available on my 360.  Not so tired that I was going to shell out the $179 for a 120GB drive direct from MS though.

From looking around online, a bunch of sites indicated that it was easy to buy a bare 120GB drive and make it 360 compatible with only minimal trouble.  Of course it voids the warranty on the original drive, but I really wasn’t that concerned.

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

http://beta.ivancover.com/wiki/index.php/Xbox_360_Hard_Drive_Upgrade

To get all this to work, there are a few hard and soft tools I needed.

• Torx T-6 and T-10 screwdriver bits to open the casing.
• new WDGWD1200BEVS drive - It’s a standard 2.5″ 120GB SATA drive, but the only one that works with the tool.  The drive itself was $54.99 at newegg.com.
• USB thumb drive
• PC with SATA connectors
• USB / SATA external HD sled – I found this useful for quickly swapping between the old drive and the new one when backing up /restoring partitions
• HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool
• Windows 98 System Files
• hddhackr – utility to prep new drive for 360
• Xplorer360_extreme2 – tool to manage partitions/data on 360 drives and Memory Units

The hddhackr tool has to be run from DOS, so I set about trying to make a bootable USB thumb drive.  Prepping the bootable usb drive was the hardest thing oddly enough.  After MANY failures I found http://www.bay-wolf.com/usbmemstick.htm and those steps worked great.

Once I had that part handled, getting the drive out of the 360 was easy.

Obviously the HDD pops right off the top of the console.

Four T-6 screws hold the casing together.  The one on the top left is under the Microsoft security sticker.  Bye Bye warranty.

Four T-10 screws secure the drive in the casing.

The SATA/power connector pops right off, and the drive can be slid out of the casing.

With the drive out, I plugged it into the desktop machine and booted from the USB drive.

hddhackr allows you to clone the hddss.bin from your original drive to the new one, but if you do that, it ends up being the same size as your original.  Dl’d the hddss.bin for the 120 drive from ivancover, and it worked like a charm.

Without reassembling the whole drive casing, I just plugged the SATA connector back on and left the drive dangling to see if it would work, and it did!  Formatted fine, downloaded some stuff, played a game I had copied to a memory unit and back to the new drive.  One thing left is that the compatibility partition wasn’t there, and needed to be copied from the old drive.

I tried Xplorer360_extreme2, and while it let me backup and restore Partition2 on the drives it didn’t see the files on the other partitions of the old drive.  That’s not so horrible as it’s mostly save games from things I rented at one point or another and probably won’t again.  The rest is DLC, videos, and maybe some random other content that I’d like to keep.  So I”ve either got to keep swapping drives and move 500MB at a time via the Memory Unit and/or redownload everything I had before.  Small price to pay I suppose.

Here’s hoping MS doesn’t get bitchy and start bricking consoles where people have swapped the drives out.  Kinda nuts that Sony lets you do it easily with step by step instructions, and MS doesn’t.

It was about time that something unpleasant befell my 360.  Not the RROD, just some juice on the controller.  Still functional but the buttons were kinda stuck.

A few problems:

• Most of the “disassembly” videos on YouTube are just people throwing the controller out windows, or against the steps of their house.  Not how I’d like to accomplish that portion of the task
• The screws on the Xbox 360 controller are security style Torx, with the little post in the middle.  Lucky me, I have a set of security bits and the right size torx is in it.
• BUT.  The bit is slightly too large to fit in the holes at the bottom of the controller.

So I had to do some surgery, with a drill.  Specifically  a 1/4″ masonry bit (it’s all a had that would do the job).

This worked out pretty well.  Almost surprisingly, I didn’t wreck the controller with the drill, just widened the holes a bit, that’s all.

Once the bit could clear the plastic, disassembling the housing was easy.  From there, washing the affected internals took care of the spilled juice.  Plus I had the chance to clean all the hand krud off the triggers and housing.  Really a blessing in disguise.  And so, all is back to normal, no more stuck buttons.