TEK Nemesis Posted March 13, 2019 Report Share Posted March 13, 2019 Hi everyone! I am absolutely thrilled that the original XBOX scene is still alive! I modded a bunch of XBOXs back in the day and I kept one of them. It's a nice crystal XBOX with an X3 (with a 1MB 3294 BIOS) and the nice LED control panel. I don't know why but back then I put a version 1.1 mobo in the crystal case. Back then a popular addition was a little fan underneath the HDD when you did an IDE HDD upgrade so it still has one of those still. (Nobody does that these days?) The other day I started it up and it was okay but it froze on a half a dozen or so games. At a closer glance, some of the file or folder names had some funky symbols so I thought to myself that I better replace the aging HDD. I'm so happy to see the new hardware available. I ordered a nice 80-wire cable and the SATA to IDE adapter and that arrived today. I didn't have a single DVD-R in the house so I couldn't do the HDD installation easily. Sure, hooking everything up was a charm. I did a quick cleaning of the interior of the case and removed the clock cap. Started it back up and I could only use the X3 BIOS to handle the HDD prep. I had to use the X3 BIOS to FTP the new dash. That was terrible but it worked in the end. Huge problem trying to get the partition correct. I recently flashed a bunch of different (and recommended) BIOSes and when I switched from one to another, it deleted what I had on the HDD and the partition size was different. All BIOSes that I selected, to my knowledge, supported LBA48. I used XBpartitioner 1.3 and also tried XBPTableWriter to write the table for those BIOSes that needed it. It looks good right now but I'm hesitant to change to a different bank to try a different BIOS. Anyways, in the near future, I'm doing that Noctua 80mm silent fan installation and I'll replace the thermal compound on the CPU and GPU. Glad to be here! Cheers! 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
neighbor Posted March 13, 2019 Report Share Posted March 13, 2019 welcome! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nikeymikey Posted March 13, 2019 Report Share Posted March 13, 2019 Hey dude, welcome to the site. If you have an X3 then you honestly only really need the latest X3 bios and don’t need to worry about any others. I would just get your drive set up whilst using that bios and leave the others alone Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TEK Nemesis Posted March 13, 2019 Author Report Share Posted March 13, 2019 17 minutes ago, nikeymikey said: Hey dude, welcome to the site. If you have an X3 then you honestly only really need the latest X3 bios and don’t need to worry about any others. I would just get your drive set up whilst using that bios and leave the others alone That was one of my biggest questions in my head. I just flashed the first four banks with the original 3294 and then the last four banks with a 3294 that forces 480p. Now if I can figure out the problem of why every time I reboot my F and G partitions revert to 120GB and 1.9GB then I think I'll be good. Any ideas? I'm going to try a different IDE 80-wire cable and a different SATA to IDE interface jut to be sure. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TEK Nemesis Posted March 13, 2019 Author Report Share Posted March 13, 2019 Or, is it totally okay to stick with 120GB on F and have the rest on G. I thought I read somewhere where they recommended to stick with 927GB for F an G but maybe there was simply a limitation to XBPartitioner. I was using version 1.3 and I also tried the HDD setup in X3 chip live setup. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nikeymikey Posted March 13, 2019 Report Share Posted March 13, 2019 I have 927gb on f and g, this is the best way to partition a 2tb drive and those partitions must also use 64k cluster size. You can use xbpartitioner to check this. I had to use it to get my partitions correctly formatted and sized. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KaosEngineer Posted March 13, 2019 Report Share Posted March 13, 2019 You can't have a 1.9TB partition. LBA48 only supports a maximum of 1TB when using 64KB clusters. I'm not sure the X3 BIOS will properly format a 2TB HDD. You'll need to use XBPartitioner v1.3. Run XBPartition v1.3 and check the configuration of the 2 extended partitions (6/F and 7/G). Make sure there is not an ER printed to the left of the size. If so, they need to be reformatted to 927.78GB each using 64KB clusters. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TEK Nemesis Posted March 14, 2019 Author Report Share Posted March 14, 2019 6 hours ago, KaosEngineer said: You can't have a 1.9TB partition. LBA48 only supports a maximum of 1TB when using 64KB clusters. I've tried XBPartitioner 1.3 about a dozen times and everything looks good until I reboot and then the partitions go back to 120 and 1.9+. (I'm using a 4 TB.) So, then I just left it with the 120GB and 1.9+ GB for the last two days. I've installed about 120GB of games on the F and G partitions, ran them and everything is working well, though extremely slow until the app is loaded into RAM. Am I to assume that if I try to install beyond 1TB on the G drive that I will run into problems? Thanks for your help! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TEK Nemesis Posted March 14, 2019 Author Report Share Posted March 14, 2019 So, as luck would have it, I tried again. 927 GB for each partition in XBPartitioner 3.1. Saved it. Powered down. Powered back on and the partition tables remained (879, 510.88 MB for F and 949, 188.88 MB for G). I launched XBPartitioner again and it said 927 GB each with 64 (and no ER). Everything seems to be running much faster right now. Can I be this lucky? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nikeymikey Posted March 14, 2019 Report Share Posted March 14, 2019 927 each and 64k is exactly what you want. It took me a few goes with xbpartitioner to get the formatting to stick. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KaosEngineer Posted March 14, 2019 Report Share Posted March 14, 2019 (edited) 6 hours ago, TEK Nemesis said: Am I to assume that if I try to install beyond 1TB on the G drive that I will run into problems? Thanks for your help! Yes, data will be overwritten once you hit the 1TB point corrupting files already on the drive. Actually, the corruption point will be determined by the cluster size used on the partition - 64KB max partition size is 1TB, 32KB max partition size is 512GB, 16KB cluster 256GB. Even though the HDD access patch is called LBA48, the cluster counter remained 32-bits thus cluster size * 0x100000000 is the max size accessible. The cluster counter range is from 0x000000000 to 0xFFFFFFFF. When you go past the max value, the counter wraps back to the beginning writing data over already present data. Edited March 14, 2019 by KaosEngineer 1 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TEK Nemesis Posted March 14, 2019 Author Report Share Posted March 14, 2019 4 hours ago, nikeymikey said: 927 each and 64k is exactly what you want. After you select that and reboot, what does the dash see for your partition sizes? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nikeymikey Posted March 14, 2019 Report Share Posted March 14, 2019 My dash sees 927gb for F and G. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KaosEngineer Posted March 14, 2019 Report Share Posted March 14, 2019 5 hours ago, TEK Nemesis said: After you select that and reboot, what does the dash see for your partition sizes? Make sure you write the partition table to the HDD. Use the White button to switch between all the command options available. The current command will be displayed in the upper left box on the screen. Press Start to execute the selected command/operation. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TEK Nemesis Posted March 15, 2019 Author Report Share Posted March 15, 2019 (edited) I finally figured it out with all your help and scouring the internet. I posted a summary under the X3 BIOS discussion so that people can make use of it in the future. Essentially, I needed to force the X3 live settings to look to the partition table on the HDD rather than use it's own hard coded table. From there, XBpartitioner 1.3 was able to do the right thing. I'm using 1020GB partition sizes with 64kb clusters (because I'm using a 4TG SATA HDD). Dashboard reports the exact same sizes for F and G and when I went back to check XBpartitioner, there were no errors - both still said 1020GB with 64. Thank you everyone for your help! Edited March 15, 2019 by TEK Nemesis Added more precision. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KaosEngineer Posted March 15, 2019 Report Share Posted March 15, 2019 Ok, can you take a picture showing the entire screen of the XBPartitioner v1.3 and post it. Just want to take a look at it. Never seen one with larger than 927.78GBs each for partitions 6 and 7. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TEK Nemesis Posted March 15, 2019 Author Report Share Posted March 15, 2019 6 hours ago, KaosEngineer said: Ok, can you take a picture showing the entire screen of the XBPartitioner v1.3 and post it. Absolutely, I can. It'll have to wait another day. I'm copying over about 600GB of data right now... I'll set a reminder to get at it tomorrow. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TEK Nemesis Posted March 16, 2019 Author Report Share Posted March 16, 2019 (edited) On 3/15/2019 at 10:13 AM, KaosEngineer said: Ok, can you take a picture showing the entire screen of the XBPartitioner v1.3 and post it. Just want to take a look at it. Never seen one with larger than 927.78GBs each for partitions 6 and 7. I've uploaded a photo under the XEcuter 3 Ce topic: Edited March 16, 2019 by TEK Nemesis 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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