2TB Xbox Woes

[crosscrunchy10]

I am experiencing some very strange behavior with my 2TB mod. Here is the setup of my console:

Softmod using the Splinter Cell exploit and SID 5
Installed XBMC4XBOX 3.5.1 as the dash
HDD initially formatted using Xbox HDM, then F: and G: formatted using XBPartitioner v1.3 to 927GB each with 64k clusters.
Using Kingwin SATA -> IDE adapter and 80 pin cable

I am sure that many of you with this mod have heard about the 300-500 GB 'limit' that some people supposedly hit where their games start breaking and the filesystem corrupts. My console is doing exactly this, but only with certain games, and regardless of whether I re-copy those specific games to the hard drive. For example, 007: Goldeneye - Rogue Agent does not reach any sort of splash screen when launched. The XBE is launched by xbmc, and just hangs at a black screen. The Start + Back + L + R shortcut does nothing, and the console essentially freezes. With Call of Duty: Finest Hour, the game reaches the Start Screen and plays music, but does not respond to any controller input. In 25 to Life, the Start menu works perfectly, until I try to launch the campaign and the game freezes.

It appears that this would be an issue of HDD corruption, caused by incorrect cluster size, but I have done the 1kb file test and the drive showed a 65,536 byte decrease in size (65536/1024 = 64) so it is properly formatted to 64k clusters. I can try reformatting again, but this is the 2nd time I have attempted to copy over the complete NTSC library.

This thread has a slightly different issue, but suggests clearing the TDATA and UDATA folders, which I have done to no avail: (It's a web archive link in case the site ever goes down) https://web.archive.org/web/20151001141 ... 33&t=19878

Do some games just not work properly with 64k clusters? I am near my wits end with trying to resolve this issue, and may just revert to a smaller drive if I can't figure it out.

[xman]

F: and G: formatted using XBPartitioner v1.3 to 927GB each with 64k clusters..

That is exactly the right amount of GB per drive you should have and is not your issue. Have you tried rather than FTPing the games onto the 2TB, use DVD2Xbox to load the games via the disc onto the HDD?. Some games like Midtown Madness and Links Golf, I could never get them to work correctly when I FTPed them to the HDD however when I used DVD2Xbox, they worked perfectly. Other than that, I would chip or TSOP the machine. Also, a lot goes on in the adapters when they are initialized and this can lead to problems as well but it usually results in simply not booting the machine so I would suspect that last however don't right it off as the cause.

[crosscrunchy10]

Hmm, that would make the most sense considering that the same games are having problems even after I reformat. I need to do some more testing, but the theory so far is that the drive is not actually corrupting, but that the games do not handle ftp well. Assuming this is true, this is good news in that the 2TB installation was a success. This is bad news only in the sense that my xbox is slimmed down and no longer contains a DVD drive The ejection mechanism was broken, so I removed everything but the drive board. I still have all of the components, so maybe I will re-assemble the dvd drive and try copying the failing games using dvd2xbox. I have another xbox with a working drive to test this on as well.

Edit: I just thought of a possible solution. What if I send over the games compressed, and then use the Xbox's built in decompression tool to extract the games? I have a feeling that the error is occurring because of long file names or strange characters, so maybe this will bypass that?

Edit 2: To ensure that there is nothing wrong with the partitions themselves, I am going to test a few of the non-working games from the E: partition. I have about 3GB of space, so most games will fit. If they launch from there, but not from F: or G:, then I most definitely have a formatting problem. If they still fail there, then it is a problem with the game files or the FTP process. Following that I will FTP a zip file over and extract it to F: or G: and see whether doing things that way works.

Edit 3: HOLY SHIT IT WORKS (as far as I can tell lol). So, I did things a little bit differently than I originally planned, and I'm not sure what made it work, but hopefully one of these steps will help someone else down the road. I will tell them in paragraph form here, then summarize below. I decided to move my Xbox to my PC setup and connect it to my computer via Blackmagic Intensity in case I needed to record the issue. This meant that I changed my Component Out connection, as well as my network connection. I am 99.9% sure that that had nothing to do with this working, but I must be thorough. Following that, I turned on my Xbox and decided to clear the CACHE folder on my E: drive. I didn't test any games right after doing this, so I don't know what the results of this were. I am assuming that this fixed the problem. After that I FTPed over 25 To Life as a zip file to the G: drive, and then extracted it to E:\games. I launched it from there and it worked! And then I tried launching it from F: and it worked! So I second guessed the fact that it was even broken in the first place and decided that Goldeneye needed to be tested. I copied Goldeneye from F: (where it wasn't working) to E: and it worked perfectly, and then I tested it in F: and it worked! I didn't even do the whole FTP-zip thing with Goldeneye, it was the same file folder as before. Finally, I tested one more broken game - Conker: Live and Reloaded. Previously, it wouldn't even show the splash screen, but now it works perfectly. So, in summary:

• Moved Xbox to new TV and Network (Likely no effect)
• Cleared E:\CACHE (VERY LIKELY THE SOLUTION)
• Ran a game from E:\games, then from F:\games (Likely no effect)

Clear your cache when you are having problems and hopefully things will swing your way

[NeMesiS]

F: and G: formatted using XBPartitioner v1.3 to 927GB each with 64k clusters.

Would there be any benefit in using 128k cluster for a 2Tb drive?

[crosscrunchy10]

As far as I know, the xbox doesn't support 128k clusters. At least that's what I've gathered from reading other forums.