After over 2 decades of loyal service, and over 9 years of uptime, My first modded xbox's HDD finally bit the dust. Super sad to loose all the save data, and the treasure trove of Homebrew/Emulation, but I am actively working on recovering what I can. There is a chance that the drive hasn't totally failed yet, although that is an exceedingly slim chance. (The wiper and platter sound like Neil Peart)
The Xbox does boot into evox, although it has the stability of a Jenga tower stacked on one brick. I've read that aside from chimp, and ftp, some people have had success with block by block recovery methods.
Has anyone tried gddrescue? (bash) I do have a backup of the eeprom.bin, and its entirely possible that my usb dock isn't playing nice with the drive. So I'm about to try one of my IDE PCI cards, or one of my legacy systems with onboard IDE. Just dont want to waste time installing windows if I don't have to (I'm allergic to telemetry)