Xbox 2tb soft mod worked great - now boots to a black screen/orange Led (reads discs)

[Tengugurl]

Hi there!

I recently soft modded my xbox with a 2tb hdd. I had the dashboard xbmc-emustation dashboard installed and it worked just fine (a little slow on the load/boot before any games were added but I chalked that up to a 2tb being in there)

Added about 40 or so Xbox is via dvd2xbox (my personal collection) and then I proceed to turn it on and then....... Black screen

It boots discs just fine, used the Rocky 5 tools disc and thought, well.... Maybe I just reinstall the dashboard. So I proceed to install it again (maybe the xbe got corrupted or something). Well, same thing after I "reinstall the dashboard to E" drive.

It just doesn't want to boot to a dashboard, any fix out there that anyone could share?

Things to note: 1) hdd is new (I can hear it trying to boot) 2) orange Led - plays discs 3) no dashboard updates or anything, just played spiderman 1 and a few emulators 4) I Recapped the pcb and removed the clock capcitors so no leaky caps

Thanks for your help! I am sure it's fixable but, I tried all options I read online. Now to turn to the pros thanks

[professor_jonny]

Is it formatted to the correct sector format as you may of corrupted it copying on files if it was formatted incorectly.

[Coldly-Indifferent]

Yes, that is always the thing to ask with 2TB HDD. It must be split equally between F and G so they're both <1TB and formatted to use the correct cluster size for up to 1TB partitions ie. 64K.

If you exceeded the maximum HDD content for the cluster size being used by default 16K (up to 256GiB) then the moment you did that the drive would corrupt (40+ Xbox games + other stuff might just do it). If either F or G, the extended partitions, are corrupted they're both gone unfortunately as you have to reformat for both which will wipe whatever content is still there in the process.

However it shouldn't have corrupted the dashboard assuming that it is on the E:\ or C:\ drive. I don't know how XBMC-Emustation is set up but it could be using a shortcut XBE to a main dash folder/XBE somewhere else. If that was on F:\ or G:\ it could explain the problem.

[Tengugurl]

Hi! So I had a bit of luck and a bit of unfortunate news.

1) it's not broken/softmod remains intact
How did I fix it?
Booted into Rocky5 tools disc, found my xbe for the dashboard on e drive and saw it wasnt corrupted. Pheww!

What did I do next?
Went to f drive and sure enough I had an extra xbe for xbmx emu on there so I deleted it and now it boots perfectly!

2) not so great news
Lost all my roms, lost all my xbes for emulators and kept some games that I ripped.

Not a worry though
I can copy over the contents once more and do it even better this next time.

Lesson learned one must split the hard drive up to an f and a g drive.

I watched a video on this, any pointers? https://youtu.be/dearT4bEEqQ

By splitting my drive as I should have done, will I lose the games stored on f/games?
Not a big concern as I am in the process of backing everything up incase that happenstance

[Coldly-Indifferent]

It may be possible to save some stuff from F but its safest just to reformat both the extended partitions correctly and start from scratch IMHO.

[Tengugurl]

Nice, that's what I'll end up doing.
Best to start fresh

[Tengugurl]

I just remembered why I didn't follow the video word for word... When I used chimp, it didn't give me an option to split between g and g. It just said F custom size or something

When I went to the file explorer it was 2tb worth of space on f.


Does that mean I should be okay to fill-up my f drive with games?

The only reason I had a problem initially is because I had a random xbe in my f root