How to Upgrade Your Retail Xbox 360 Hard Drive! [Full HDDHackr Tutorial] 

For anyone have trouble with device media write protection on USB around 6:00 when trying to format with ms dos folder. Run CMD as admin Step: 1 - Type in "diskpart" Step: 2 - Type in "list disk" find your disk if you have multiple hard drives & your usb as well because on what you have plugged when formatting any storages. for my drive i had to select disk 4 since i had multiple drives plugged in. Step: 3 - Then type your drive "select 4" Step: 4 - Type in "clean" Final Step: Type in "convert mbr" Then you should finally be able to bypass that device media write protection. Hope this solves anyone issue still in 2023

If you are having an error pop up when using the bootable usb drive creator that says the drive is write protected, I found a way to fix it. First press the windows key then R. After that type "diskpart" then press enter. Once you are in diskpart type "list disk". Find your usb drive, then type "select disk n" (n is the number that your usb drive is). After that type clean, and once it has finished type "exit" and that should fix it. Hope this helps!

Thank to you I was able to change my HDD since it failed me. I couldn't do that without your vid, thank you again !

Thanks a lot for the tutorial. I am a little behind in the scene but just broke out my 360 after a few years of storage. I just so happen to have had a 320 drive laying around and it all went smooth. Luckily I still have a xp machine just got xbox 360 modding and was able to dump my own partition 2, tested with Panzer Dragoon Orta and it all booted up like a dream. The speeds for loading are much better than the stock 120 HD.

I’ve basically revived 4 Xbox 360s from thrift stores using this tutorial Thank you so much! Only thing I’m gonna say is that my usb drive only let me format to fat32 and I had to change the pc bios settings from ahci to IDE but it worked flawlessly.

Honestly, huge thanks man this was really helpful !! I did not think it would work at first but it worked really well .

Still works in 2022. Thanks a lot for the video!

Awesome video and tutorial, sadly my hard drive was too old to use this on. I will definitely be trying it with a newer one at some point. Thanks. :)

I like your beginning, breaking bad :D

Followed this guide with great success. Thanks!

You guides helps me a lot, if i can i always mod my consoles from your tutorials. Here, everything went flawlessly except hddhackr. My new desktop not supporting only AHCI mode, my older laptop is the same. I have bunch of old computers at my storage, hooked up 3 of them, every time HDDHACKR freezed. Redownloaded from another place and still the same and i installed a new psu on a 2004 HP desktop what i found on the streets :D Bios error, not starting boot menu and lots of error, after trying 20 times it finally came up and hddhackr started.... god i was happy AF. After this everything worked, Xplorer360 also worked on my new desktop using Win7 compatibility. :) Thank you.

Confirmed this is still working in 2019. Used an old WD Blue 500GB I had laying around. WD only tho, tried a Toshiba and Samsung SSD to no avail. Thanks Mr. Mario, liked and subscribed!!!

I was having a huge issue getting hddhackr and Xplorer360 to run, but thankfully I had an older laptop lying around that supported the entire process

I buyed a generic HDD but it was really fucking slow, and didn't want to save Halo Reach or GTA5 stuff in it, so i formatted it and follow the steps from scratch and now it works like a charm, thanks dude!

HOLY SHIT IT WORKED, due keep in mind it didn't work at first, I had to do some stuff in the bios: First I changed my SATA mode to IDE from AHCI in the bios, then after it not working again, I tried changing the slot in which the Hdd was plugged in from a slave to a master slot, while keeping the IDE setting, this go it to work. It your having trouble just keep trying. I a have WD hdd, Scorpio I think. HUGE THANKS!

Thanks! I upgraded from 20GB to 320GB

Still good for 2021 as well. Found myself a 4GB Slim and had to build a new hdd for it. Now have everything working fine except the signal strength but that is for another day.

I ripped a WD AV-25 320GB WD3200BUCT out of my old YouView Box instead of a WD3200BUDT from the list of compatible drives. Also works! My old 360 is now revived! RECYCLING RULES! Thanks!

Hello I know you made this video back in 2015 but I just want to say thank you. I bought a use xbox360 and it had no hard drive. It does now!!! Thank you again.

just did this lmao, so I can be the first to say it works in 2024 :) My friend gave me a bunch of old acer aspire laptops with wd blue drives years ago and now they have a purpose 😁

I was finally able to get around on doing this! I ordered a WD5000LPLX from NEWEGG. The manufacturing date of the drive is March 24 2015. Followed the tutorial and the drive worked like a charm! The speedy WD Black Drive is now inside an Original (Non-Slim) XBOX 360 HDD caddy I got off ebay for cheap. Two noteworthy things: 1) When flashing the bootable USB drive, I had to flash it with FAT32 instead of FAT because FAT was not an option. 2) When booting from the flash drive, I had to plug it into a USB 2.0 slot. For some reason my motherboard would not recognize the bootable drive from one of it's USB 3.0 slots. This probably has something to do with the "Windows Millennium" prompt. I had originally ordered a WD Velociraptor drive but then I saw that you needed a giant heat sink for it so I decided to go with the WD Black drive. I would have preferred installing a SSD like I did with my PS3 but I don't think flashing the firmware of a SSD with that of a HDD would be a good idea.

Your video helped a lot. Thanks

Thank You!! Worked perfect!!

Thank you, man! Worked perfectly for me. :)

I encounter minor issue like the usb was writing protection, but i was able to remove it with diskpart, but everything else worked perfectly. Thank you!!!

Hi! Im getting an error that says "Failed to format" when I try to create bootable usb flash drive.

I am having a problem !!! ... When I put the Hard Drive in the xbox after doing all these steps it said unformatted !

Upgraded a Jasper unit by taking a broken 20GB HDD out of the stock enclosure. Used a 500GB WD Black drive I had laying around. Speed difference is absolutely night and day when it comes to loading. Games seem to run smoother and have less stutters now as well, I imagine it is because the console isn't waiting on the HDD? Awesome tutorial!

Thank you m8 , very helpful

hey Mr. Mario! thanks for your wonderful guides... they're just perfect! I need some help though, would it be possible to do this on a laptop without having to replace my laptop hdd with the one I wanna run hddhackr i.e. via usb... when I run hddhackr, I get only a msg saying no ata devices blah blah... any help pls?

Thanks i GOT an Xbox 360 pro from sweeden for just 10$ and now i upgraded the 20 GB to 250 GB thanks to You .ps ny chipset Dident work but i just found the oldest desktop computer I cud find and then it worked.Plus I got patrion 2 from the old storage device

Dude, you are the Fucking Man! You just saved me $40 bucks! Thanks for Being Awesome! Pls Continue Xbox 360 Vids, your the ONLY Trustworthy, Knowledgeable, guy on here who actually knows what hes talking about. You are literally the RU-vid XBOX 360 Guy!

For anyone that is trying to do this with Windows 10 and get the error message: ''This drive is write protected" with the bootable USB creator do the following: - Download Rufus bootable usb creator - Select FreeDOS - Place the hddhackr.exe on the usb - Boot!

so if i want to put a ssd in my xbox e , any help , has some one done this ?

this still works, thanks.

For those of you with the No ATA Drive error. Switch you bios to IDE mode

Ran into drive write protected. was pulling my hair out but it wasn't the thumb drive. make sure to go into usb drive boot folder, right click, go down to properties and uncheck rad only if it is checked. Worked great for me!

Hey Mario, after following your video step by step I've run into an issue where I connect the prepared WD Blue 500 GB HDD back to the HDD caddy temporarily and plug it into the 360 to format it, well after trying to formatting it it still says unformatted and that kind of left me confused 😕 Would you have any other solutions or suggestions to fixing this problem? Thanks in advance 😁👍 I think it might have to do with my computer having only ATA mode and AHCI mode maybe 😕 However switching to ATA mode allowed me to take the necessary steps with HDDhackr so I'm not entirely sure what's going on with the formatting part...

after watching this. i'm considering on upgrading my drive for my 360. since xbox has been having alot of free games with gold lately. i thought it was sorta interesting that you had to use MS-DOS for part of the mod. i'm just starting IT at a community college and we were talking about different GUI's. great video by the way

Finally I got it working with my WD Scorpio blue, if your PC won't boot into dos just try to override it in the bios, and if you get " no ata device " just change the sata mode in the bios to ide.

Hey bro, I've seen that there is a difference between internal and external hdd for some games and dlcs for the Xbox 360 and for internals you need a specific type of drive. Is this necessary now or can I use any hdd to make it internal?

Ha i know RJ too ! He as cool guy did a bit of work to his Mercury cougar in ABQ .

Looking to do this as I'm running out of space on my drive. Has anyone tried to do this with an SSD? Or does it have to be an HDD? Also, trying to follow your ending steps, does that copy over all the information over from your original Xbox HDD to the new one? So all downloaded content, saved games, etc. will be there?

done this 2 years ago.. now i had to do it again. you have to set the storage options in bios to IDE MODE. in ahchi mod hdd hackr can not recognize the hard drive.

No ATA devices!!! My mobo doesn't have support for IDE since it's a Z170. I have 1 laptop with legacy option, but when I press enter after writing hddhackr.exe in DOS it doesn't do anything and then I can't write anymore. Is there any possible way to do it without hddhackr? Will there be an update of hddhackr for newer system? Am I doomed? (I am so pissed that I wasted my day trying to get this to work.)

Thanks bro just did this pull out my old ass computer for this 😂

Story time I went to GameStop to get a replacement HHD a few months ago so I can play some original XBOX games. I didn't have a chance to play anything until a few days ago and little that I know it wasn't a certified Microsoft HDD but some off brand knockoff drive. I called them and ask for a refund and guess what... they won't give me my money back. Not only I got a non Microsoft HHD but also it wasn't backwards compatible. -Nice one GS- So, now I'm going to try this and see if I can get this drive to play OG XBOX games. Wish me luck.

Dear, MrMario2011., How Did You Get That Guy, From Breaking Bad To Make An Intro For You?, Because I Was Really Really Amazed!

HI, some questions here... hope you can help. 1.- The USB boot creator tool does not format the USB as FAT only FAT32 (My USB stick is 8GB - > might be the reason) try to format it using windows but no luck either. 2.- when I finally decided to leave the USB stick as FAT32 and then copied the HDDHACKR and HDDSS.BIN to flash the disk I got an error (when trying to flash) that the files are corrutpt. some checksum or MD5 errors. Doing it on a borrowed laptop so I have to switch disks back and forth.. Tedious... Are there any tools for Linus I can Use? Any advise?

I use a WD500LPVX 500Gb and only recognizes 294Gb, this was the internal HDD of my XBOX ONE (i swap it for an SSD so i decided to use this one on the X360), i don't know what i did wrong but to be honest 294Gb is waaaaaaaaaaaay better than 20Gb, so i will keep it like that. Thank you soo much ♥

Works like a charm as of June 3rd 2023, I used a 250GB Western Digital Scorpio Blue WD2500BEVT (for the love of god people, this tutorial only works on WESTERN DIGITAL disk drives, you can search what models are compatible on google it’s easy) I happened to have lying around thankfully as I bought an Xbox 360 E with no HDD (I was using the 20GB from my fat Xbox and I couldn’t instal one game lol), I’d like to point out you can use FAT32 specially since that’s really the only options I could get with a 16GB pen drive it will still work, also if it gives a write protection error go to disk management find the USB drive and delete the volume and just make the bootable USB. And if people can’t find the ATA drives make sure to go to the bios and change to IDE only, and plug in sata data 1 2 3 or 4, after these it won’t show up if you have a lot of sata slots on your motherboard and use lots of drives like me lol. Just thought I should drop these tips. Thank you once again Mr. Mario even your almost decade year old videos are super helpful!

I get "reboot and select proper boot device" or "insert boot media in selected boot device and press a key. And I did everything you said in the video.

Question: do I HAVE to use a Western Digital drive? Because I have a Toshiba drive that I ripped out of my old laptop.

Hey can I follow the same procedure for a 128gb western digital SSD?

8:20 if you get a message saying "No ATA devices detected", reboot into BIOS and set the SATA controller to IDE mode. It won't work if it's configured as AHCI.

Hello , I just got a WD black series HDD (500GB - 7200RPM) and I'm trying to do this... just got a question though. So before putting the new Hdd in the computer , do we have to change any bios setting ? and thanks in advance.

Any chances this could work on an ssd? It is a WD Blue 500 GB. I'm getting the message, " Western Digital Vendor Intro failed on port 0x40D0. Make sure you have connected Western Digital Scorpio series Hard Drive. If you choose to resend the the command to should turn the drive off and on after you pressed "Yes". Do you want to resend the command until the drive responds?" What does this mean?

Maybe I missed something but it would have been a nice warning to tell me my PC has to be IDE SATA mode before I took my PC apart...

Hello, sorry to bother you, I followed your steps but I came across a problem, after setting up the boot drive and hard drive I go to turn on my computer and it doesn't recognize my bootable flashdrive "no device to boot to" so what do I do about that?

Is there any update in 2020 as far as the hard drive size is concerned like 1tb or something? thanks!

Hey Mario. When you copy the partition 2 contents from your original hdd, is that when your profile, games, and other files are transferred? Or is that another step?

sir i got a question though, what if I just use a USB SATA cable and plug the HDD that I wan't to use for my xbox? will it do any difference? I can't seem to open my laptop since the keypads and everything needs to be removed for me to be able to detach my HDD on the laptop i'm using.

What can be done if HDDhacker doesn't detect the drive once booted?

I'm trying to squeeze as much performance out of my XBOX 360. I did some tests with some USB 2.0 & 3.0 flash drives and I found that the 500gb HDD that comes with the newer models performs better than the flash drives. I don't think a USB SSD will perform much better so I'm thinking of getting a Western Digital Black Series. Do you know if the firmware is compatible with WD Black drives?

hi man thanks for the tutorial , i have a question , im triyin this on a WD caviar blue 3200aajs or sj will it work?

Thanks, you save my xbox.

so do h you have to use hddhackr to actually be able to download games on to the drive? if so then what is the purpose of using this, and having that much memory if you can't download games on it?

I did this to my 750gb wd drive but i lost the original ss is there a way to reverse this back to normal without it?

i got an seagate 320gb from an xbox 360 s that i format and use for my pc how can i use it again in my xbox

Thanks a ton for the tutorial. Was able to make my less than useful 20gb hard drive to a 500gb hard drive lol.

i have hdd wd scorpion blue bevt 160gb.....will it work?

i got the flash drive formatted and have the hddhacker thing on flash now. but theres no hddsss.bin in all of that that i downloaded from link about to put in flash drive. where do i go to get it? i need one for a 120gig drive

how to you transfer saved game files would you just back up one of the other partitions

Hey, Mario! Are there any quicker methods today to create a new hdd for the xbox 360? I see that there are some tutorials which use cloning programs to clone the old hdd to a new one, will that work?

This was an excellent tutorial! He even gave you a "heads up" on problematic areas so you know not to worry. One bit of feedback though- you cannot do this in all laptops. I have an HP Pavillion 2000 that I used but I kept getting a "NO ATA DEVICES FOUND" error despite having legacy boot support enabled in my BIOS. I came to find out that my chipset only supports SATA controller so it couldn't work. Luckily I had a spare laptop that it did work for and it worked just like he said.

where is the security sector folder in you zip ? containing the hdds folder ?

Hi, I did all of this and the hard drive looks right, but when I plug it into the XBOX with the caddy it doesn't see it. It does VIA USB though. Any thoughts?

I tried doing the bootable drive usb creator tool using three different flash drives and I always have the same result. It always tells me, "failed to make the DOS-bootable. I am trying to put it in the DOS folder in the flash drive as well. Please help.

Tried it, the Xbox still doesn't acknowledge the drive so I can format it.

Hi I have bad command or file name when I put hddhackr.exe in laptop

You could have mentioned that hddhackr is only compatible with WD drives, instead of saying it's what you recommend. A few other drives might work, but from what I found online on different sites it was designed for WD and doesn't work at all with any Hitachi drives.

I think this might be obsolete. In my tinkering with the newer 360 dashboard it will allow you to use any usb flash drive or hard drive that it approves. It will also provision(make a 360 drive) and format it for you if you want to install games. I do like I can co mingle non xbox data on the same drive as long as I don't choose to provision it(make a 360 drive). I don't see any need to use any hacker software to do that. It is just to bad the dashboard can't provision a dvdrom replacement on its own. I have yet to try that with the made for xbox drives rather they were issued with one or not.

Hi i like your video very much

when i type in hddss.bin ,it says not found im running 8.1 windows ,i renamed it as said in video..

Sorry to dig up an oldish video, but how would one go about reverting this hard drive to be useable in a PC again after it's no longer needed? I have a 500gb HDD that was flashed to a 320gb before the 500 was available. Do I just do this same method but with the 500gb sector and then format on the PC?

Would this work with a WD SSD?

Is it possible to restore the original partitions and files to a genuine xbox 360 320gb drive that someone reformatted. Now it will only show up on the 360 when connected to usb.

Thank you thank you❤

Will this guide work with a random SSD? I have some SSDs laying around and i'm interested in doing this mod to them

So I have a question. What if I only want the partitions? 1,2,3?

To download the files, you need open the link in the description, and must be right clicking to the green link, and "save target as", because other ways do not work.

Okay someone explain to me why my 2021 built computer was able to get the program to boot all the way to “No ATA” screen mean while a computer from 2006/2007 that actually has an IDE sata mode option cant even boot to the DOS screen. So Im stuck between a newer computer being able to get to no ATA screen and not being able to get farther vs an old pc that cant even boot to USB I cant win at all. All these hdd just sitting here unable to get to the final step

Can I use a Windows USB hard drive for this instead of a Western Digital drive?

I haven't rgh my console yet but I just fitted a 1tb internal hdd in a phat case. Even though 500gb is the biggest official drive you can get, I heard the console's limit is 2TB. Am I able to format my new drive on the xbox directly with a hack?

Was your old laptop a HP DV6 series?

Would you mind redoing this video now in 2022 with links in the description to safe downloads. Please and thank-you

can you do this with the off brand 360 hard drives to get backwards compatibility

Thanks worked great

tyvm i, was able to get a 320 gb wd hard drive for $15 and was able to work it with xbox 360

when i create bootable it say usb drive write protected