XBOX Soft Mod

My friend Matt had soft modded an xbox he got during my last year at school, at first I though it was cool, but did not see any use, however I quickly started to love the ability to stream any media to the big CRT tv we had in the living room. After I graduated I started to miss that ability, as well as having something to play Halo 2 on from time to time. So I went on ebay and found a good deal for an first gen xbox with three controllers, the advanced av pack(s video + optical sound) and the DVD remote kit. All for $33, which is not a bad deal at all. Then after waiting a week for it to arive, stupid ups ground, I finaly got a chance to have some fun with new hardware.

Fist off I read up on the steps to soft mod an xbox, check it out the tutorial here. I had no problem getting my kernel version and using ndure to build a installer, then packing it up and for burning a disk with xboxhdm. However that was when my problems started to happen, first off I could not get the drive unlocked by hot swapping the drive, it ended up not being a swap issue, instead it was a bios problem with the dell model I was using. After a few hours of poking I finally realized I had to plug the drive in first for the bios to know that there was a drive attached then do a double hot swap to the xbox for unlocking then back to the computer. I only figured it out because the drive would only show up if I plugged it in before starting the computer.



After getting the drive hot swapped, I ran into my second problem, the install failed due to lack of space. I am still not sure what was up with this, however after using the restore option twice, I finally decided to try letting it fail and see what happens. This turned out to be fine as it still soft modded the drive, which started up fine, however it was lacking any applications other then the basic dashboard. This was fine as I was able to grab a copy of ConfigMagic and ftp it to the apps folder and then use it to get the EEPROM off the board. This was my main focus as after I got the EEPROM I could always unlock/lock a new hard drive at any time. After I had it backed up I was able to breath easy.

My next step with to change the drive to a 200Gb so I would have plenty of room for movies and other files. This also gave me a challenge as well, as I did not have a DVD drive in the PC I was using, which meant I could not use xboxhdm to format the drive. I was stuck for a bit till I could out that there is a much easier way to clone the drive by using Chimp (Read more Here). I did a test on a 10Gb drive first and it cloned it perfectly. Then I tried the 200Gb, sadly it took three tries, but after stalling and eventually returning to the main menu a few times, it finally moved on to the next menu and I was able to clone it. The nice feature of Chimp is that automatically formats the F partition with the extra space difference between the drives.

Now that I had my drive all set and the xbox soft modded all I needed to do was install XBMC as the dash, which was simple, and then move all my files over to the hard drive, which took the longest till of all. After that I was playing with the built in skins. Matt had the xTV skin that I liked, but I eventually decided on MediaStream as my favorite skin, and I think it is a little easier to use for my family as well.

All in all, a successful and useful mod, now I just need to mod the stock fan, as it is loud and annoying at times.