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How to Cheaply Upgrade an XBox 360 Hard Drive

The Xbox 360 hard drive, included with the Xbox 360 PRO pack, has a capacity of 20 gigabytes (GB), of which 12 are accessible by the user for saving games, movies and other media. The hard drive comes in a special enclosure that interfaces with a dock-style connector on the top of the console. Microsoft has a 120GB hard drive upgrade, but at a much higher cost than the equivalent blank hard drive from a computer parts retailer. You can upgrade the hard drive yourself at a significant cost advantage with the proper tools.

Things You'll Need

T6 and T10 torx screwdrivers
PC with SATA interface
Western Digital Scorpio WD1200BEVS 120GB SATA hard drive
Hddhackr 0.91 software
Windows XP boot disk image
USB thumb drive

Instructions

- 1
  Copy the Hddhacker software and the boot disk image onto your USB thumb drive.
- 2
  Remove the original 20GB hard drive from the top of your Xbox 360.
- 3
  Unscrew all of the torx screws from the outside of the drive enclosure and open to expose the metal hard drive cage, then remove torx screws holding the cage in place.
- 4
  Lift the cage off the hard drive, and disconnect the power and SATA cables from the hard drive.
- 5
  Remove all other SATA devices from your computer, and plug the new Scorpio drive and the old Xbox 360 drive into your computer, connecting each to a SATA cable and a power cable, then boot the computer from your boot disk image thumb drive.
- 6
  Open the Windows command line prompt and type "run hddhacker." The program will ask you to make a backup of the firmware on the original Xbox 360 20GB hard drive to copy onto the new drive. Once the process is complete, you will be prompted to restart the computer.
- 7
  Boot into the disk image again, and type "run hddhacker" again to verify that the firmware has been successfully copied. If so, the program will show the drive formatted as an Xbox 360 drive.
- 8
  Remove both drives from the computer, and plug the new Scorpio drive into the SATA and power connectors inside the Xbox 360 drive enclosure, and reassemble the drive enclosure.
- 9
  Plug the new drive into your Xbox 360, and turn the console on. Go into the "System" settings, then select "Memory," where you will have the option to format the drive. Select the drive formatting option, and wait for the process to complete. You can now save game files, load games onto your hard drive for faster level loads, and save other media to your drive.

Xbox 360