360 Hard Drive Upgrade Idea

[bragac200]

Hey Guys - see what you think about this idea. OK so you can take apart the 360's hard drive and inside is a regular notebook hard drive (this we know):

http://www.anandtech.com/systems/showdoc.aspx?i=2610&p=5

So why not do the following: take apart your hard drive, buy a 100 GB drive, copy the drive image from the 20 GB drive to the 100 GB drive (so you can get the file system, all your data, etc.), re-assemble the 360's hard drive package, reattach the drive, and now suddenly you've got a 100 GB drive! Anybody think this would work?

Worst case scenario you take the drive apart again, put back in the 20 GB and you're back where you started plus a 100 GB notebook drive.

One thought I had was that the drive would be that just cloning a 20 GB onto a 100 GB drive might not work. How would the formatting software know how to format the empty space? I'm by no means an expert on drive cloning so I could be wrong on that point...

 

[SpeedZealot369]

I think people did that with xbox1, so I donno maybe search modding websites and see.

 

[erwos]

Wouldn't work. Two reasons:
1. IIRC, the 360 drive has some special firmware that uniquely idenitfies itself. Unless you could replicate this on the new drive, the 360 would just reject the new drive.
2. If you were to do a bit-for-bit copy, you'd wind up with a 20gb partition and 80gb of wasted space. You'd need to resize the partition first. Are there tools that do this yet? I don't think so.

A possible third reason is that Microsoft might be limiting available space to only 20gb in software, too.

Microsoft has been decidedly less stupid in terms of security this time around. Obvious, simple hacks are probably not going to work. In fact, I'd be worried about getting banned off Live, too. Not worth the risk, IMHO.

-Erwos

 

[JimPhelpsMI]

Hi, Usually no problem CLONING smaller driver to larger. Jim

 

[jdkick]

Indeed, partition sizing can be controlled during the cloning process.

That said, erwos points re: firmware, software or other hardware detection routines may prevent this "mod" from being successful. The only way to find out is to try.