The OEM Xbox hard drive comes from MS in a “locked” condition. This is a privacy mechanism which was intended to prevent you or hackers from looking at the contents of the original disk.
If you place the OEM drive into a PC, the PC bios will be unable to unlock the drive, and the drive will not enter a “ready” state that the PC can deal with.
It should be also noted that if the drive were to be unlocked the PC would still not understand the drives formatting mechanism so it would still be unable to display its contents. Even imaging programs such as Norton Ghost will fail to read or duplicate the drive.
Why lock (or unlock) the drive?
If you select to put a new hard drive in your Xbox you MUST first already have a modchip in the machine with a bios that supports hard drive swapping (Xecuter 4977 etc)
The normal bios and first and second generation mod chips were never designed to support drive swapping. The original unmodified bios code for handling the drive is contained on those older modchips.
As you will see later, locking a drive requires that the Xbox be first able to utilize an unlocked drive.
As a result DO NOT proceed unless you know that your bios/mod chip already supports hard drive swapping.
If you have a mod chip and replacement bios which does support the “hard drive swap” there is no immediate compelling reason to lock the hard drive. Your Xbox will actually operate just fine with the replacement drive.
It has also been found that XboxLive works quite well with modified Xboxes, although the mod MUST be disabled or you will be banned.
What does locking accomplish?
Locking the drive permits the Xbox to utilize a replacement drive in the same manner as an OEM drive. During startup, the original “protected” bios will temporarily unlock the locked drive during the boot (flubber animation) phase and be none the wiser. When the unit is powered off, the drive goes back into its fully locked state.
With the original BIOS enabled, any additional space seemingly disappears. As far as the Xbox is concerned it is still running on an original 8 gigabyte hard drive. You do not loose the information contained therein though!
This may be a very good thing down the road if the powers that be decide to implement something new.
However there is that one bug in the ointment, your replacement hard drive!
When you boot up the Xbox using the original bios, with a replacement but unlocked drive in place, you will inevitably see the “your Xbox needs servicing” message.
This is because the bios attempts to unlock the drive with a UNIQUE code and expects a reply from the drive indicating success. If it does not get the reply the Xbox assumes that something is wrong with the drive, shuts everything down and issues the error message.
The Lock codes
The OEM bios generates the unlock key “on the fly”. That is it generates a unique key or password which is dependant upon several things.
This password is generated by looking at your Xbox’s unique serial number, configuration, revision level and the information obtained from the currently installed hard drive itself.
This in turn means that you cannot simply use a password from another drive or Xbox when locking a new drive. Instead you must figure out what the Xbox is going to use as an unlock password for your new replacement drive. Fortunately the Team Assembly hackers gave us a wonderful tool to do this very thing.
This “tool” is called Config Magic and can unlock / lock your hard drive with ease and also gives you the ability to edit / backup your entire eeprom contents.
Verify that your Xbox boots with the mod chip after locking.
Verify that your Xbox boots to the default MS dashboard after disabling your mod chip
Congratulations you’ve successfully locked your hard drive.
المشاركة الأصلية كتبت بواسطة (Solid Snake)
