XBMC4Xbox

A mates just thrown me a bunch of cash to go nuts on a console for him.
Interested in seeing what 1 & 2 Tb drives people are using and recommend.
And the BIOS they are using them with...

Already ordered one of the SATA to IDE converters everyones using.
Been looking at a Seagate Barracuda 2TB SATA3 6GB/S (7200rpm)
http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/271222209384 ... EBIDX%3AIT

Cheers, Nemo

What sata to ide adapters are people using these days?

SATA Adaptor Compatibility thread:
http://www.xbmc4xbox.org.uk/forum/viewt ... f=13&t=612



Seems most people keep posting the same bloody thing with a few exceptions.

Anyone able to tell me the Brand and Values of the capacitors on em please.

The ones in that picture are 470uf 16v

SATA Converter

Inspection:
So my SATA converter came in the mail yesterday...
Overall it looks alright but a couple components haven't been installed properly.
Theres not alot of solder around the back of the power connector, as shown below.
Might give it a bit of a touch up and since I'm ordering in some capacitors
I'll replace the Chinese caps with some quality Japanese Panasonic caps.

Installation:
Was concerned with the positioning of the plugs since the converter raised them to the top.
Quickly figured out that the power plug can be popped apart and could then easily
turn the wires around so that it may fit in the tray better, as shown bellow (yellow wire)
Another concern was the pins at the back of the converter which could easily touch the HDD.
So I had some 2-3mm thick (foam), double sided tape, which I used to insulation between the two.
Had to connect the power cable before I screwed the HDD into the tray, as it was a very tight fit.
But once I got it all in there, it come up very neat and tidy, shown below.

*Theres a jumper to either select master or slave, I removed this assuming it would give me "cable select"

Something Odd:
Well I've run into a couple of problems whilst trying to get this converter to work with a 160gb drive I had around.
I used my autoinstaller to format and install dashboards, etc... I noticed something odd,
After formatting the HDD with EvoX the partitions still come up as empty, until I rebooted the console.
Normally you would boot EvoX and available space for partitions would be displayed.
But when I reboot and EvoX starts-up (from DVD) the partitions pop-up randomly one after another, few seconds apart.

*Is there something I'm doing wrong or is this normal for SATA drive or do I need to set jumper to "master"?

Moving on:
I managed to install the dashboards via FTP, everything seems to be working as normal.
But I got error 16! "Clock cannot be set" , "There are some bios'es around that allow the chip to boot past the clocksetting"
I immediately flashed the modchip with X2-4981.06, "If you get an error 13 after this, read up on the error 13 explanation"
Sure enough I got error 13 "Dashboard launch fail and the dashboard didn't specify why it failed."

So thats about where I got to last night before I passed out, I'll have another crack at it later tonight...

Install some draft stop on the back of the circuit board or hdd so the ide socket does not short out on the hdd.
I secure it in place with some tape so it does not move around when you bump or move the xbox.

I have had a few returned to me ant that was the problem.

Cheers PJ

I got it working fine once I put the jumper back on "master"
I'll have a crack at installing this 2Tb drive i got, see how we go...

XBOX 2TB SATA Upgrade Tutorial
http://www.xbmc4xbox.org.uk/forum/viewt ... f=14&t=649

I finally found some time to install the above 2Tb Seagate drive and adapter I bought...
iND-BIOS 5004.67 was used and prepared the drive with my auto-installer...
XBP1.3 was then used to reformat F & G individually to 927Gb at 64 cluster...
The entire process took about 10 minutes and seems to be working just fine...

Sounds easy
How long is your boot up now please ?

hawsey wrote:Sounds easy
How long is your boot up now please ?

Not long, probably bit quicker with this hdd...
Quieter too, Dont hear it working away like the older drives I have.
I've install about 250gb of data on both F&G partition...
Seems all to be working just fine...

Always manually check your clusters size. This can avoid you some massive headaches.

http://www.xbmc4xbox.org.uk/forum/viewt ... 452#p14452
(No need to format anything, it was just for this particular case, to fix a wrong cluster size.)

Xphazer wrote:Always manually check your clusters size. This can avoid you some massive headaches.

Did the cluster test on G partition while in evoxdash:
before: 996.136.517.632 bytes
after: 996.136.452.096 bytes
difference of: 65.536 bytes
conclusion: 64kb cluster size confirmed

Cheers

You can also use chimp to check the cluster size of a partition, it's in option 8 of the menu.

I just check and make sure I have 927GB of unused space on F and G drive. You have 927GB left in a partition, it is clustered correctly. I used to do the 64K check but I found this a lot easier and quicker.

hawsey wrote:Sounds easy
How long is your boot up now please ?

Mine take about 12 seconds to cold boot to the XBMC splash screen but some HDDs like to be about 1/2 full to get to this time. I have had some empty HDDs, other than formatting, take up to 40 seconds. Other HDDs boot up in under 15 seconds with virtually nothing in them. As I use the same brand and type HDD, it seems to be the individual HDD rather than brand or type.