FATX PC Support?

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GoTeamScotch
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FATX PC Support?

Post by GoTeamScotch »

Did some searching and can't find an answer to this that isn't from 8 years ago. I know this has been talked about before but I'm wondering if any developments have been made in in the past few years.

I recently picked up a USB 3 adapter that accepts SATA + IDE/PATA hard drives and I've been using that with success to format Xbox drives and other basic tasks. Anyways, I've started using disk imaging as a means of modding stock drives and after experiencing those high transfer speeds, it made me really crave those speeds when building the occasional 2TB drive. I know I can make an image of a 2TB drive, but sometimes I'm building a 1TB or smaller drive and want to copy select data over. Copying via FTP at 11MB/s is painfully slow compared to the ~120MB/s I get over USB 3.

My question is this: is there a way to transfer data to FATX formatted Xbox drives connected to a PC? Are there native FATX drivers for Windows or Linux? Is HDD imaging the only way to achieve modern transfer speeds?

I know there's xplorer360 but that seems to choke with thousands of files. I've also experimented with ldotsfan's Xboxhdmusb23 tool to no avail. It has a folder where it references files that can be copied to a FATX drive but if I drop in over 700mb of files it hangs when qemu boots. I've tried mounting a virtual disk image that just points to my external HDD but didn't get anywhere there either. Xboxhdm only recognizes the CD drive and doesn't know what to do with my external drive. Are there other tools to try?

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Related: Linux FATX Filesystem Driver - Read-only - by mborgerson & ldotsfan: https://github.com/ldotsfan/fatx
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Re: FATX PC Support?

Post by professor_jonny »

Eaton from Fatxplorer is implementing it in his software he has had life issues and has delayed his release but I believe in the coming few months there will be an update.
There are other alternatives but none are to reliable that I have found.

best to use xboxhdm a Linux distro to read and write an Xbox hdd from the pc there is party buffalo and a few others you could try under a windows pc.
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GoTeamScotch
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Re: FATX PC Support?

Post by GoTeamScotch »

I've never heard of party buffalo. I just downloaded it and it opened a x360 drive I have just fine. I'll play around with that. Thanks!

I could never get xboxhdm to recognize a large partition/path. I use it to build drives but not for transferring. Any partition you feed to it needs to be 700mb or smaller or it chokes.
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Re: FATX PC Support?

Post by GoTeamScotch »

I could never get Party Buffalo to recognize my drives. Is this tool intended for xbox 360 drives only or something? Maybe my USB/SATA adapter isn't compatible with it?

Did some more poking around on this subject. At the moment it seems like FATX support is very very limited if you want to use a PC and not actual Xbox hardware. Unless I'm mistaken, XboxHDM's linux image seems to be the most capable way of interfacing with Xbox hard drives. If I'm wrong about that, I'm all ears.

Currently I'm investigating trying to mount additional drives in XboxHDM in QEMU from the host OS with the goal of being able to connect an additional Xbox drive and/or an OS formatted drive (FAT32/NTFS). This is all assuming that there isn't a bottleneck I'm not aware of in xboxhdm's linux image. I'm not sure if the xboxhdm linux image has some limitation in it that I'm not aware of that would slow transfer speeds way down because maybe it's emulating old slower hardware or something. If I do get extra drives to mount properly, my plan is to either try to use xbrowser to copy files between drives or write a script to handle bulk file copying (if xbrowser chokes on thousands of GB's for instance).

Anyways, I can register additional drives pretty easily by changing the arguments passed to QEMU and have those drives appear in linux, but it seems like I can't mount any of the FATX partitions in linux. I'll see the drive appear but I won't see any partitions, which makes me think that xboxhdm is doing something special to mount the 1st Xbox drive. I'll do some poking around into how XboxHDM initializes and mounts that 1st Xbox drive.

Besides hooking up two FATX formatted drives and copying files that way, I'm also trying to use FAT32/NTFS drives from my host machine. Linux 2.4 seems to have support for NTFS formatted partitions but I'm not sure to what extent. I'm just starting to experiment with this.

Any tips/pointers would be appreciated. Let me know if this is a pipedream.
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