Xbox hd upgrade

I purchased my original xbox new in 2001, right after they came out. Over the years I have accumulated a library of 45 games and had to replace the DVD drive once. But last month, the hard drive started making clicking noises at times when you turned it on. I had to do something quick, or I was going to loose all of the saved games on the drive.

After researching my options, I found out that the best option was to install a softmod so that I could gain access to the files on the drive. There are plenty of pages on the web that explain how to do it, so I won't go into that here. But to make a long story short, I was able to get the drive to boot up, without clicking, long enough to install UnleashedX and backup the files to my pc. The next challenge was to get those files onto a new drive. Luckly, there are some great software tools to get the job done. I used xboxhdm, which allowed me to format a 40 GB drive for use in my xbox.

With the softmod and new drive in place I was able to save the life of my old xbox. The next step was to install xbmc (xbox media center). The biggest issue of course is finding the right software since most of this stuff was created back in 2004 when the xbox homebrew craze was at it's peak. After the xbox360 came out, most people moved on to that system. As a result, many of the scripts and plugins for xbmc no longer work. I was able to get a few video plugins to work, but the one I was really hoping for (hulu) failed to load any video. High quality streaming video plays smoothly on the old xbox and I was impressed with how much faster and easier it is to turn on the xbox, and navigate to a video, than it is on a pc. This is a taste of what a true Internet media center could be, but sadly, development and support for this platform is getting hard to find.