Upgrade a Jtagged Xbox 360's hard drive, restore the avatars and Xbox 1 emulator

If you have an Xbox 360 console that has been Jtag hacked I'm sure you will be aware that a lot of the security restrictions that are present on stock Xbox 360's are removed, one of these restrictions is the hard drive size limit. A Jtagged console can use any 2.5" SATA hard drive, the make, model and size do not matter.

This guide will show you how to:

• Upgrade the hard drive to any size 2.5" SATA hard drive
• Setup the correct partitions
• Restore the Xbox 1 emulator
• Restore the avatars

Ok lets begin, the first thing you will need to do is purchase a hard drive, any 2.5" SATA hard drive will work fine so feel free to buy which ever hard drive you desire. I purchased a 1TB Western Digital Scoprio Blue drive (WD10TPVT) at Ebuyer.com



Unlike upgrading the hard drive on a console that is not Jtagged no hacking with Hddhackr is required, we are now going to remove the old drive from the 360's hard drive enclosure and swap it with the drive you wish to upgrade to.

Opening the 360 drive enclosure

You will need a Torx T6 screwdriver to do this.



You can now remove the top, the mechanism to lock/unlock the HDD-bay on your Xbox 360 console might fall out… don’t worry it’s easy enough its put back together, just look how it is in my photo below.

Now you have 4 more screws to remove, these require a Torx T10 screwdriver, you can then remove the metal case.



Now you can unplug the power and sata cable from the drive, then slide it out pulling the drive gentily up as you do so.



Now you want to insert the new drive in to the 360 caddy / enclosure, depending on the size of the 2.5" drive you might need to snap the 4 prongs off the 360's drive enclosure as seen in the photo below.

9.5 mm drives will fit in the enclosure without having the prongs snapped off, however the slightly larger 12.5 mm drives will require them to be removed.
To remove simply bend them and they should snap off with ease, the enclosure will still re assemble fine without them don't worry.



After you have re assembled the enclosure connect the drive to your console, power it up and go to the memory management screen.

All been well you should have an unformatted hard drive show up, if your Jtagged console is Jasper with 256 or 512mb of internal storage be sure you format the actual hard drive and not the internal storage, you can tell them apart by the icon, as seen in the photo below.



Highlight the new drive, press Y to go in to device options and format the drive. You will be asked to enter your consoles serial number.

The new drive formatted:



Now we are going to restore the backwards compatibility partition, to make this as easy as possible for beginners I have created a CD with the applications and files you will need to do this.

You can download an image of this cd here: harddrive.iso
If you are unsure on how to burn CD images have a look at Digiex's guide on How to burn BIN, CUE, DI, DVD, GI, IMG, ISO, MDS, NRG and PDI images to disc. (Remember to unzip the ISO!)

When the disc has burned put it in your 360, it will be read as a Mixed Media Disc, go to the Game Library and you should see XEX Menu 1.1, load it up. (Select exit if you are asked to sign a profile in)



When XEX menu has loaded press the right shoulder button, this should display all the files on the CD



Select the HDD Compatibility Partition Fixer folder and load the default.xex



You will be warned about erasing the partitions on the hard drive, press A to create the compatibility partition.



When this has finished switch the console off as instructed, then turn it back on again and load XEX Menu.

Press the right shoulder button then use the D pad to navigate to the files on the DVD, now highlight the compatibility folder, press Y and select copy.



Now press left on the D pad until you get to HddX, then press Y again and select paste.



The hacked Xbox 1 Backwards Compatibility v5829 (November 2007) will now be copied to your console.

The Xbox 1 emulator is now restored, this will let you run Xbox 1 games and some Xbox 1 homebrew.

Your new hard drive is almost ready to use, all we need to do now is restore the avatars.

**This is the risky part that could potentially brick your console if you don't listen, so pay attention!**

To restore your avatars you need to run the official Microsoft dashboard update for the version of the dashboard your Jtagged 360 is running, To find out what version your console is running go to: System Settings > Console Settings > System Info



Here we can see my console is running the 9199 dashboard so I MUST run the official 9199 update to restore my avatars.

If i was to run a dashboard update newer than 9199 it would also update the 360 and not just restore the avatars like we want. If this was to happen the update would patch the exploit the jtag hack uses and blow an e-fuse. It would only be possible to recover from this if you had removed the R9T3 resistor when Jtagging the console. So think about what you are doing and you will be fine.

Download: Xbox 360 NXE Dashboard Update 2.0.9199.0 With Avatars

In the future newer dashboard versions will be released so please do check, at the time of posting 9199 is the latest dashboard.

To restore your avatars you can either copy the relevant update to a FAT32 formatted USB drive or burn a DVD with the update on. Which ever you choose to do ensure a folder called $SystemUpdate is in the root the the USB drive or DVD with the system update files inside this folder, this can be seen in the screenshot below:



After doing so ensure the Xbox 360 is on the dashboard, then connect the USB drive with the update on to the Xbox 360 or insert the DVD with update on. You will then have to then switch the console off, power it back on and your avatars should be restored.



I think that should cover everything, hopefully your Jtagged Xbox 360 should have a nice large hard drive with a working Xbox 1 emulator and avatars.
You could get to the end result of this tutorial in several different ways, I have tried to make this tutorial as easy as possible for beginners to follow.

If you have any questions or problems do feel free to ask and I will do my best to help.