Difficulty building new HDD from backup

[sine730]

Hey all. Years back I softmodded my Xbox and installed a 500GB WD Blue IDE drive. That drive recently failed and I'm trying to rebuild a new HDD using the FatXplorer 3 beta. I built the drive using my own backup files, but when I try to boot, I get Error 16. And now that the drive is locked, Windows (and FatXplorer) are no longer able to find the drive. It does not show up at all in Disk Management. I've resigned to the fact that this hard drive is probably unrecoverable. I've got a few more drives to work with but I wanted to consult here before aimlessly bumbling around and needlessly locking more drives.

Here's some more info:

• I have a full backup of the Xbox - C and E drives, bin files (bios.bin, eeprom.bin, disk.bin, hddkey.bin), hdd key in plaintext hex, etc.
• The new drive is a 2.5" WD Blue, 320GB, connecting to my computer via internal SATA
• I'm using a Startech adapter and 80-wire cable
• 1.6 Xbox, clock capacitor replaced
• The system goes to Error 16 immediately after the boot animation finishes
• My computer's BIOS recognizes the drive, and it prompts me for a password on boot-up, but typing in the key (hex values) wasn't successful.
• I used my eeprom.bin backup in FatXplorer when it came time to lock the drive

My questions are:

• Is there any way I can wipe and unlock this drive? Bootable disk utilities, etc
• Do we know what error 16 might indicate in this situation? Google suggested bad clock cap but I replaced that with a Nichicon a few years back
• Any idea where I may have gone wrong or what I can try differently on the next HDD attempt?

[OGXbox Admin]

What did you lock the hard drive with? You should be able to unlock it. They set known master passwords depending on what you used. 

Secondly, If you're capable of desoldering a capacitor and soldering in a new one, you're capable of soldering a modchip into the xbox. It's basically the easiest console to hard mod. Do that so you don't need to lock hard drives anymore. 

[sine730]

6 hours ago, OGXbox Admin said:

Secondly, If you're capable of desoldering a capacitor and soldering in a new one, you're capable of soldering a modchip into the xbox. It's basically the easiest console to hard mod. Do that so you don't need to lock hard drives anymore. 

Fair point. I’ll probably go that route. Thanks.

[sine730]

6 hours ago, OGXbox Admin said:

What did you lock the hard drive with? You should be able to unlock it. They set known master passwords depending on what you used. 

FatXplorer. Heard.

[sine730]

Update: I got Rocky5's HDM build to work, but not the one on his GitHub page. That one would only boot to the stock dash, not the softmod installer. I tried a copy someone on Reddit linked, and that worked. Not sure if that's isolated to me or if others are also having trouble with that. Whatever though I'm playing Xbox again that's all I care.

Edited December 23, 2024 by sine730

[sine730]

Thanks for the tip on the master password, that was helpful, allowing me to make as many attempts as I needed. For whatever reason neither FatXplorer nor XHDM would find the locked drive. What ended up working for me was creating a bootable Linux thumbdrive and using hdparm to unlock the drive. Then restart into Windows. It was very inefficient re: time but it worked

Edited December 23, 2024 by sine730

[sine730]

Figure I'll document it here in case anyone else runs into trouble unlocking drives with a known password. Here's the linux commands I used to unlock the drives:

hdparm -I /dev/sda    //print drive lock/freeze status
hdparm --user-master m --disable-security FATXPLORER /dev/sda        //turn off security for drive /dev/sda which is locked with master password "FATXPLORER" (-I is capital -i)

This was done on a desktop tower. Xbox hdd connected via internal SATA. No other drives present; I yanked the Windows drive every time to minimize damage potential. I used Slax Linux installed to a USB drive with Rufus.

Not sure why I wasn't having luck unlocking with Windows tools. I tried internal SATA on two different machines (sandy bridge optiplex and 10th gen intel laptop).

Edited December 23, 2024 by sine730