ok i know this isnt a pc mod... but sometimes stuff overflows to something else... anyway here goes my project. i had the idea several months ago to use one of those "TRIOS IDE drive selector" switches for my xbox to switch between different hard drives. say default(1), games(2), and movies on a 3rd drive. i also have a spare xbox case which i will use as the hdd enclosure. all innards are removed and i am going to "chop the top" down about 3cm or just where the bottom of the drive tray would sit. then use a flat piece of plastic on top so the real xbox can sit directly on top of it. now, the hard part. i dont know if this is possible, since it is beyond my electronics knowledge. what i want to do is, instead of using a big ol 4p4t rotary switch for the drive power (which is how i would be selecting drives instead of that pricey trios thing) i would love to use the original eject button to switch the power from drive to drive and also have the leds change color as the drive selection changes. the eject button is just a normal switch mounted on a small pcb in the front panel and it already has 2 bi color LEDs (red/green/yellow[both]) if this would be too complicated, should i go with the rotary switch instead? i know thats much easier to do. any help, info, or comments would be great! thanks, RuStY
well yes, thats a given. i have flashed the onboard xbox TSOP basically turning the onboard bios into a modchip.
I'm gonna say it won't work. Why? Because Xbox, just like a PC, has a BIOS that detects the harddrive when it boots up. Now if you wanted to make it so you could change the drive while its powered down, I don't see a problem with that. But in that case just use a harddrive swapping bay and put your harddrives in the extra harddrive swap cages. That way you can turn it off, pull drive out, put drive in, turn back on.
I am going to have to agree with cooljoe there. the xbox is basically a pc, it runs on a 1000mhz sloweron, you can't just switch what harddrive it thinks off of without switching the cables inside while it is turned off. also I would like to point out that the xbox uses it's own filing system that you can't make yourself. however I know windows picks it up as ntfs.
Also, the idea of just changing the power to different drives wouldn't work, since you'd need all drives connected to the IDE cable. It's near impossible, and if possible very impractical to do this mod :/
Copying the file system shouldnt be a problem. You can use a hex editor or something like that - i think win hex. It just copies the whole hard drive bit for bit. Maybe Norton Ghost would work as well - no idea. I did that to replace the hard drive of my friends nomad jukebox (changed it from a 6gb to a 30gb). This was way before the 20gb version and the nomad jukebox 3 came out.
of course i will have to power off the xbox first then switch drives. i know how to partition and format xbox drives, that is why i didnt mention any of this in my original post a custom ide cable is easily built, just have to make sure its not too long.
http://anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1561&p=2 3rd paragraph, 2nd paragraph under the picture.... Thank you very much.
x-box drives are locked with a password and the FAT is completely different. You have to unlock the original drive, make an image (p.s its partitioned) and burn it onto another then lock them both.
yes, yes these are all facts which i already know! can we stay on the topic here. this isnt post your knowledge of the xbox. its just an IDE switch, and an led indicicator. ah forget it ill do it myself. markit, yes that is the long, tedious, and old way. you dont need to do all that crap now.
