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Swapping hard drive from dead OG Xbox to a working one


BiffWellington
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I have an OG Xbox that no longer works, I've tried a different power supply and replaced some capacitors that were bad no luck, my friend gave me a working Xbox same model. Is it possible to swap the drive from my dead one to the "new" one and retain all the data? Also if I can't do that would it be possible to transfer the save data and games to the new system?

Edited by BiffWellington
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The main problem will be if the Xbox was not modded or it was a softmod: reason being that in both cases the HDD is locked to the dead Xbox's MB.

If you can get the eeprom from the dead Xbox's MB and you have another, modded, Xbox you can use them together to access the locked HDD.

 

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9 minutes ago, HDShadow said:

The main problem will be if the Xbox was not modded or it was a softmod: reason being that in both cases the HDD is locked to the dead Xbox's MB.

If you can get the eeprom from the dead Xbox's MB and you have another, modded, Xbox you can use them together to access the locked HDD.

 

So even if the dead one isn't modded?

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5 hours ago, BiffWellington said:

I have an OG Xbox that no longer works, I've tried a different power supply and replaced some capacitors that were bad no luck, my friend gave me a working Xbox same model. Is it possible to swap the drive from my dead one to the "new" one and retain all the data? Also if I can't do that would it be possible to transfer the save data and games to the new system?

If both are the same version then you could read the eeprom form the non working one and write it to the working one then swap the HDD over

Or swap the eeprom chip from the old to new.

 

Cheers

SS Dave


Soft modding is like masturbating, It gets the job done but it's nothing like the real thing.

 

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That's a bit of a hard core solution don't you think? :)

There are apparently ways of unlocking a Xbox HDD on PC; I've read advice about that on other forums from KaosEngineer so he's probably the guy to ask about that although it seems to be a quite complex process.

The only other way of getting the eeprom from the dead Xbox is using an eeprom reader. That's usually possible if there is not catastrophic damage to the MB. But as SS_Dave points out there are still other, unavoidable AFAIK, criteria invovled.

Modded or not doesn't really change anything but if the original Xbox had been softmodded there would be a good chance the eeprom had already been backed up. But even then people do that then don't follow through the whole process which is to back that up to a PC ASAP afterwards too. The eeprom backup is almost useless if it is left on the Xbox HDD.

It why advise people softmodding that once their original retail HDD is softmodded they immediately replace it with a larger HDD and put the locked, softmodded retail HDD into safe storage as the ultimate safety net. I even do that with chipped machines ie. softmod the original or spare HDD or build a softmod later by other means and lock it just in case.   

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17 hours ago, SS_Dave said:

If both are the same version then you could read the eeprom form the non working one and write it to the working one then swap the HDD over

Or swap the eeprom chip from the old to new.

 

Cheers

SS Dave


Soft modding is like masturbating, It gets the job done but it's nothing like the real thing.

 

So if they are different versions I am out of luck?

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19 minutes ago, BiffWellington said:

So if they are different versions I am out of luck?

To get the data from old Xbox you will need to power the eeprom from a 3.3 volt supply and unless you isolate the chip from the board then you will need to have a fairly strong power supply as the 3.3 volt is the main power for the whole board.

Once you have the data then you can extract the HDD key and write the to the new Xbox and swap the HDD to it.

When you tried a new PSU was it the correct version supply as the 1.6 supply is not compatible with the 1.2-1.4 even though it has the same plug.

 

 

Cheers

SS Dave


Soft modding is like masturbating, It gets the job done but it's nothing like the real thing.

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