More hours tick by as I learn how to do this during the doing of it. Having already been through all the steps and paid attention would’ve paid off by this point. But the only time I saw it done wasn't a teaching atmosphere, and I've regretted that since.
But that experience resulted in my first xbmc box, the softmodded and hard-drive upgraded xbox that's become a ubiquitous part of our entertainment center here in the casa. That particular install/instance of the video-playing swiss-army-knife that is xbmc/mplayer seems to be the ghost I'm chasing throughout this current project.
That box lets me copy stuff from the hdd to the usb sticks I have. Didn’t seem to choke on mac os formatted stuff, but preferred fat 16/32 format. Of course some sticks just don't work at all, but I didn't think that would vary from unit to unit. Duh...
Tonight I’ve been butting my head on the fact that the new softmodded xbox, even when booted to familiar xbmc territory and using the file browser I’m familiar with - wouldn’t let me copy to any of ‘em. None of my various usb sticks...??
I could dump the backups of the appropriate stuff on the FATX formatted usb stick that the xbox liked, but nothing else can read that. not even the win2k box, sadly to say.
I used my old standby long-ass blue ethernet cable to attach the xbox to the base station from across the room, but no luck. That dam cable should be crocheted into its own noose for all the trouble its caused me. I grabbed the whole stack of the xbox with controller on top, both sitting on top of the workhorse commie monitor. I moved them, replugged them in their new place within the length of the shorter ethernet cable, and blammo, it works right away and lets me ftp.
So I’ve got the backup folder dumping over ftp to the mac here in the background. I have to guess that I have the appropriate backups for the HDM creation, and then should be able to continue this bizarre circus of fail.
According to the xboxHDM howto, putting these ftp leeched files from the original xbox hd in the right folders, running the cmd line script will then generate an iso I can burn on cdr and use to lock the hd in the pc before tossing it in the xbox, which will then act kinda zombified and anticlimactic. It’ll be like it is now, just booting off the bigger hd with the barest essential dashboard on it.
Then I go through the installs from auto installer and get the basic apps and emus on the new bigger hd, and proceed to add all the shit that made my first softmodded xbmc box so much fun. If I can swing it, too, post project here, this may become my new core xbox, and maybe I can keep it on the network.
The win2k beast roars, buzzes and shudders back to life. about to load the usb stick, try to shuffle the necessary HDM stuff to the right folders before running the script to generate that iso. 7 minutes to go time on that score at usb1.1 speeds.
Back on the usb stick now is a finished iso to burn to cdr that should, hopefully, be a working xboxHDM for this hdd. I ftp’d the dam files myself. if the script worked and the files copied ok, first from the xbox over ftp to the mac, then from the mac to the fat32 usb stick, from that to the peecee where it underwent the ISOage.
Here we go a burning now. after all, it may take 5 minutes to copy an 190mb iso at usb1, but at usb2 it’s already done.
First stab, hdm booted once I could get a drive to let me put it in...after seeing the “no operating system” prompt (since I’ve completely bypassed the boot drive), I rebooted with the disk loaded, it booted from the dvdrom, loaded the linux live and hung on the lack of ethernet, just as it’s doing this 2nd boot.
First try I had the hard drive on the wrong channel. now it’s master and not a slave. and a few minutes, a few more ‘type yes’ instances and it’s building a c-drive on the hd. It already partitioned and formatted the f drive. c is where xbox keeps its brains. Gets to the part where it’s supposed to lock the dam hdd.
I remember T tossing it in my old amd box ceej built and having it boot, lock, and him being stunned/amazed that it worked like click bam and he didn’t have to wrestle with it. I think I’ve come these years later to understand why he was so surprised that day when it just worked, bam, locked the drive.
My HP box, another thrift store find, refuses to lock this drive. Says it’s frozen. The faqs, tuts, howtos and internet forums say to try and find a bios setting that lets me turn off “auto-detect” and then it should be seen as not frozen. I spent a half an hour flipping every toggle in the bios between reboots - but to no avail.
For future reference, keeping an old PC keyboard around is a good idea since the newfangled USB ones won’t work to trigger fkeys for bios settings during boot.
But there’s an xbox here that I thought was b0rked last week. I got it home that day, powered up and connected, the drive spit out a copy of segaGT/jsrf as I’ve already stated, looked like a used hockey puck on the bottom. I wasn’t surprised when it didn’t boot. But I popped in a nearly-perfect original pressing of Serious Sam II and it still wouldn’t go. I surrendered to the moment and resigned myself to solving the issue later.
I read about it a lot, slept, recovered. Then the day came when I tried it again, and blammo, it fired up MechAssault without fail on the first try? Is this the same box as before that wouldn’t boot? Seems so. I followed the faqs and tuts and hustled the ‘Install Linux’ file over, softmodded it.
Installed a load of apps and emulators compared to my initial experience with xmbc and the evolution dashboard. If an 8gb hd didn’t feel like half a phone-booth with a fat guy in it...I might be more drawn into investigating it. But my enthusiasm to explore the new install has waned. I don’t have the outcome I expected to achieve, mainly because of the box I bought to replace my old pc when its mobo went bork.
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