Game playing from HDD froze/locked up system

[alcatraz68]

I recently did a softmod on a 1.6 console and installed an old IDE 320gb HDD I had from an old PC build. I tested the HDD's health first and it seems to be performing well so I cloned my exisiting Xbox HDD and installed the softmod.

I've backed up around 70 games to the new HDD and while most seem to work fine I was playing Burnout and the system froze. This was during my first race. Is this a sign of a potential problem with the HDD or something else? Looking at the S.M.A.R.T information on the console i'm now seeing a few questionable readings:

 

[KaosEngineer]

Burnout has several checks that prevents it from playing from the hard drive.  Where did you obtain the game from?

As well, some of the downloadable versions are incomplete.  There's a few hundred megabytes of missing content needed to play the game.

[alcatraz68]

3 hours ago, KaosEngineer said:

Burnout has several checks that prevents it from playing from the hard drive.  Where did you obtain the game from?

My retail disc, ripped with dvd2xbox.
I managed to play through the first championship last night with no freezes so I don't know if it was just a one off crash or not.

Edited December 14, 2021 by alcatraz68

[HDShadow]

With problems like this and a 320GB HDD I'm reminded of a mistake I made when going from a 160GB to a 320GB HHD. I was so pleased to have more space I simply forgot I needed to reformat F:\, as it was over 256GiB, to use 32KB clusters rather than the default 16KB the 160GB was using.

Any chance this is the the issue here?

Use XBPartitioner v1.3 to check if there is a ER (Error) indicator against Extended Drive 6 (F).  If there is then that is probably the trouble and unfortunately all that work backing up 70+ games to the new HDD will have to be redone.

Hope its not this but it is an obvious thing you should check. 

[alcatraz68]

13 hours ago, HDShadow said:

With problems like this and a 320GB HDD I'm reminded of a mistake I made when going from a 160GB to a 320GB HHD. I was so pleased to have more space I simply forgot I needed to reformat F:\, as it was over 256GiB, to use 32KB clusters rather than the default 16KB the 160GB was using.

Any chance this is the the issue here?

Use XBPartitioner v1.3 to check if there is a ER (Error) indicator against Extended Drive 6 (F).  If there is then that is probably the trouble and unfortunately all that work backing up 70+ games to the new HDD will have to be redone.

Hope its not this but it is an obvious thing you should check. 

This isn't the case for me, I have F and G partitions at 145gb each, both use 16KB clusters and there's no error indicator.

[KaosEngineer]

7 hours ago, alcatraz68 said:

This isn't the case for me, I have F and G partitions at 145gb each, both use 16KB clusters and there's no error indicator.

Delete all of the files and folders in the X, Y and Z cache drives.  Then, run the game again.

[alcatraz68]

On 12/15/2021 at 10:06 AM, KaosEngineer said:

Delete all of the files and folders in the X, Y and Z cache drives.  Then, run the game again.

The game has been running ok since, but if I do get another crash I will give this a try, thanks.

[HDShadow]

Sounds like it is/was what KaosEngineer suggested.

X, Y and Z are regularly 'temporarily' written too by a lot of games, sometimes pretty big lumps of data which will persist until written over by another game. If that doesn't happen or there's corruption or a conflict ie. two games using the same file name it can cause trouble.

I might be imagining this, later consoles did have such a facility, but I believe that even in stock retail state this could happen with the original Xbox and there was a controller key sequence you could use to clear the cache and those temporary files to resolve such problems.   

[KaosEngineer]

8 hours ago, HDShadow said:

but I believe that even in stock retail state this could happen with the original Xbox and there was a controller key sequence you could use to clear the cache and those temporary files to resolve such problems. 

Yes, such a key combo has been a rumor but was not something Microsoft released to the public about how to know the correct button combo to use.  Seems there are many different button combos each determined from the console's serial number.

During a support call, the MS tech requested your console's serial number, did some magic then told you a button combo to use.

There are a few possible button combos listed on xboxdevwiki.net:

• https://xboxdevwiki.net/Dashboard#Format_Admin_Codes

However, I've never had any luck with any of them working on the Xboxes I've tried them on.