He may need to redo the softmod for the reasons he detailed: "... had not touched my Xbox in years, one which I softmodded with an AR and Splinter Cell many, many years ago ..... I don't remember what I did way back then , and for that matter, I don't know what is going on in this Xbox of mine....

File Explorer....

You can't update XBMC with FTP while running XBMC.

Put the HeXEn disc back in, boot with it, then use FTP to replace XBMC with the latest version, confirm that it runs from the UnleashX File manager (under option 8. Xbox Admin), then remove HeXEn and reboot.

I've never used Power ISO, but as long as it will burn an ISO image then it should be fine. Just make sure you burn to DVD-R at 4x or slower - the Xbox is very picky about what it will read. If Power ISO doesn't work then use DVD Decrypter 3.5.4.0, because it definitely works.

It could be a corrupt BIOS on the TSOP, or other damage in that area. Time to drop in a chip, perhaps?

Your problem is easy to fix, but requires a bit of patience. The simplest solution is to download HeXEn, then use it to reinstall a clean softmod so you know exactly how your Xbox is modded, then reinstall XBMC. Download HeXEn, and burn the iso image to DVD-R at 4x or slower using DVD Decrypter 3.5....

Christmas tree lights. That's normally a bad / corrupted BIOS on a chip or a TSOP flash. How is it modded?

Some Python files missing from an XBMC installation won't make the Xbox boot to the MS Dash, so there's something else going on here that you aren't telling us about.... Which softmod did you install with HeXEn? Did you install the old XBMC with HeXEn? Is your current dash UnleashX or XBMC? If your ...

Install the new hard drive. Boot with HeXEn. It might offer to prepare the drive for you, if it does then you should prepare the drive. Select option "3.5.4. New Disk, PAL Xbox" to set up the disk properly. Once you have formatted the disk (for 160GB I'd recommend putting all the disk as p...

Short answer: No. The Xbox can only support one hard drive at a time.

You still need to set up DHCP or manually set IP addresses, give it a name, etc.

You may need to connect both the NAS and your Xbox to a switch, or you might get away with a crossover cable and static IP addresses, but it will work without a PC once you have configure the NAS server.

USB sticks are limited to 4GB, and many (as time goes on I suspect increasingly the majority) don't work even if they are under 4GB.

FTP, SMB or streaming from the Internet are the only scalable solutions.

I heard from someone on the Internet that Elvis was alive and living on the moon, but that doesn't make it true. ;) Even if it does happen, it's at most a 4GB USB stick, and reformatting it and replacing the small amount of content on there would take under a minute. Reading between the lines, I sus...

Copy D:\root.xbe to C:\, and rename it evoxdash.xbe.

Swap the DVD drive with one you know works. Boot with HeXEn, copy unleashx to C:\evoxdash.xbe, reboot normally (long press). You can then run XBPartitioner to check the BIOS.

Yes, but you still need to run XBPartitioner again without booting HeXEn first, just to confirm that the BIOS on the chip supports LBA48.

You're welcome - glad you got it sorted. You haven't done anything wrong as such. I suspect that you may have picked the wrong options when building your Kingroach NDURE file set, although I can't immediately see which options would lead to those symptoms on a new disk built with xboxhdm. You can no...

OK. So run ndts\default.xbe. Go to file manager, and use it to copy E:\ndts\files\C\bios\rt06\bios.xbe to C:\bios\bios.xbe. When it's finished, reboot the Xbox and see if you can see the F partition. If that doesn't work, run it again, but this time copy E:\ndts\files\C\bios\rt67\bios.xbe to C:\bios...

You don't need to quote the immediately preceding post. Cycling through the colours is what a SID softmod does. That's slightly worrying - not SID, but the fact that you claim to have installed a Kingroach NDURE hotswap softmod, and have ndts on there which is installed with Kingroach, but then you ...