Need Help! G Drive Disappeared and F Shows Wrong Size and No Content.

Discussion about Modding the XBOX, including hardware and software hacks.
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Excalibur007
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Joined: Mon Feb 18, 2013 3:44 am

Need Help! G Drive Disappeared and F Shows Wrong Size and No Content.

Post by Excalibur007 »

Hi,

I should probably start with the purpose of my efforts. I've had a 500GB hard drive installed in my XBOX for years and it has a LOT of work I've done for many years that I desperately do not want to lose, so I wanted to back it up to a new hard drive. I thought the best way would be to format a new hard drive and then copy the files from one to the other. However, to this point, that has not worked out at all and I hope I've not lost everything I was trying to preserve.

I've had an X3 modchip in my XBOX since around 2008'ish. It's been several years since I really messed with any settings in it or did anything with the BIOS. I'm on X3 3294 as my main BIOS. I have a 500GB IDE hard drive (connected with an 80-pin cable) that I wanted to back up before it one day goes bad. I tried connecting a new SATA hard drive, thinking the X3 would boot to the Live Config, but it didn't. It would just give an error 07 (which I've found means the hard drive wasn't being recognized fast enough... I wish I'd known that before I wasted so much time messing with it). Anyway, I tried connecting both drives, (the new SATA one to the DVD connector and used a Y adapter for the power). I was having trouble getting it to boot up, so I switched them around, with the old drive connected to the DVD connector. After quite a few attempts, I finally got the X3 Live Config to boot up. It was running extremely slow, so I figured it must be having trouble determining which drive was the Master (I found out the SATA adapter I was using makes anything connected to it the Master). So, I pulled the power from my old drive and then disconnected the IDE cable. After this, the X3 Live Config ran at normal speed and I was able to format the new drive. I tinkered around with some of the X3 settings, but didn't think I changed anything that would affect my old drive (I left the LBA 48 at the F & G gets rest setting).

After installing the MS Dash files and making the main dash XBMC (on the new drive), I powered down and reconnected the DVD drive. Then it gave the 07 error again. I later discovered that re-enabling the XBOX throbber animation on boot gives it enough time to detect the new drive with the SATA adapter (I've had it disabled for years).

I reconnected my old drive (as it had been prior to any of this process) and this is where I ran into a problem. I noticed that G was not showing any size at all and F was only showing a small partition with no content. I thought "maybe, just maybe" I had messed up a BIOS setting, so I checked that and it seemed okay. I'm now extremely worried about losing data on that old hard drive. It contains years worth of personal work on art, manuals, hacks, etc. I have not written anything to the drive since, so all the data "should" still be there, but I fear the partition table may be corrupt and I don't know if there's a tool that can fix it.

Does anyone know of a tool that can fix this? Is there anything that can do a job like scandisk or a partition repair program?



Losing my mind over this,
-Ex
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professor_jonny
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Re: Need Help! G Drive Disappeared and F Shows Wrong Size and No Content.

Post by professor_jonny »

Some times with sata adaptors they add delay when they init and the partitions/ drive may not be fully online before the kernel needs it and it boots up with partitions missing usually f/g.

try an alternate sata adaptor (one from the recommended list) and see if it rectifies the problem it most likely will.

You can try the trick to use a shortcut on c drive (the first to come online) to boot another shortcut to boot the dash it has often worked for me, don't point the bios to directly boot f or g partition apps as they are the last to come online.

also I don't think x3cl fully supports large drives and ondisk partition tables best to format with xbpartitioner 1.3 (I think)so it gets it correct.

of note testdisk is able to pull data from a xbox formated hdd you can recover data with your pc to another drive even if the hdd is corrupt or the partition table is missing, I don't think you will be able to repair the partition table but you should be able to recover its content, but it is best not to play with it and recover it first before playing futher.
Excalibur007
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Joined: Mon Feb 18, 2013 3:44 am

Re: Need Help! G Drive Disappeared and F Shows Wrong Size and No Content.

Post by Excalibur007 »

professor_jonny wrote: Tue Jul 03, 2018 1:41 amSome times with sata adaptors they add delay when they init and the partitions/ drive may not be fully online before the kernel needs it and it boots up with partitions missing usually f/g.
try an alternate sata adaptor (one from the recommended list) and see if it rectifies the problem it most likely will.
Unfortunately, it's the IDE drive (500GB Seagate) that I've been using for years that got messed up. It was my attempt to back it up while it's still a good working drive that led to the corruption.
professor_jonny wrote: Tue Jul 03, 2018 1:41 am...of note testdisk is able to pull data from a xbox formated hdd you can recover data with your pc to another drive even if the hdd is corrupt or the partition table is missing, I don't think you will be able to repair the partition table but you should be able to recover its content, but it is best not to play with it and recover it first before playing futher.
This may be a good lead. Thanks! I'll definitely check out that tool soon. I've already gone ahead and downloaded it. :-)
I hope that the directory structures can be preserved with this tool, but even if not, having the files would at least be something.

Since this happened, I attempted cloning it with Chimp (which didn't get me anywhere), but other than another clone attempt with either an old version of Norton Ghost or another tool that can do byte-for-byte, I'm not using the drive and definitely not writing anything to it. Even if I can't do anything with it, I'll be holding onto it in case I run into someone who can recover it or a utility is built that could help.
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