So on Saturday Jason and I were working (very hard I might add) in the service shop close to closing.  For whatever reason I thought about upgrading the hard drive on the Xbox 360.  I had read somewhere that it is is a laptop hard drive in an enclosure.  A quick google found that sure enough, there is hack to use a normal hard drive in the Xbox.  I did a little research (which is fairly dull since websites really don’t want to get into trouble) and before I knew it I was thinking this is a heck of a good idea.  We had a hard drive in the service shop (160GB) that would do the job, but there were risks.  For example, in order for it to work, we needed to reprogram the firmware on the drive.  Firmware…the entire brain that runs the drive.  Could toast off the entire drive, might not.  Secondly, you needed to crack open the drive enclosure that is currently on the Xbox 360, and if that didn’t go right, might toast off the ability to put it back on.  Before I left on Saturday, I successfully reprogrammed the hard drive, it now only showed up as a 120GB (which is part of it…xbox wont see anything more than 120GB currently) with the proper info on sector 16 of the drive, which the xbox needs.

I went home, pulled off the drive, and needed to remove 4 torx screws from the bottom.  REALLY FREAKING SMALL ONES!!.  I didnt have the screwdriver for it, so it waited until today to get the right one.  Turns out no-one in Estevan has the right size, so I ended up using a smaller flat screwdriver to remove the screws.  Popped in the drive in, put it back on the Xbox, and formatted it.  Formatted successfully and then shows me this:
Xbox360

This is good news.  I then loaded up the console main screen and downloaded to the drive my Gears of War 2 just to make sure it works…..loaded no problem.  So there….it worked perfectly.  Now the weird thing is…I am not keeping this, I did it just to see if I could.  I had to recover my gamer-tag and the whole works and then have to fart around and get all the stuff the same way I did before.  I loaded my 20Gb drive back in, and away I go again.  I restored the firmware on the drive, so its like I didn’t even touch it.

So tonight I went wondering who would go through the trouble to do this.  I then looked at what future shop had their own 120GB drive on sale for.  This is from tonight:

fs-xbox-price

So there ya are…buy just a drive for about half of the whole thing….granted you need to fart around to get it to work, but come on..whats the fun in that?

Chow!