Microsoft Xbox Repair Manual page 61

Notes on Hard drives
You CANNOT just swap out the IDE drive with a new one. The Hard Drive is locked using an
ATA specification that locks the hard drive unless a password is provided. Each hard drive has a
unique password that is transmitted in plain text to the drive on boot up to make it useable. If the
drive is not properly locked you will receive an error 5, this is due to the retail bios requiring a
locked drive. If you wanted to install a replacement drive into a console with a bad drive (CCS 07
error) you would first need to install a modchip that has bios that supports unlocked drives. Then
you could lock the drive using disk utilities (LiveInfo, ConfigMagic, Slayers disk etc) and remove
the modchip or leave it in for that matter. Please do not ask for links to the software or where to
find it as I don't know myself.
Another method of doing this is to put your PC next to the Xbox, use the Xbox to unlock the drive
by powering it up, then swap the cable to the PC IDE cable and then allow your PC to detect it. If
you have an Xbox with bad Hard Drive the process to swap gets a bit more complicated and there
is no possibility of doing this without installing a modchip.
If you are hoping to salvage a drive from a broken Xbox you will need to first unlock it before a
PC could gain access to it. So if you have a dead mother board this makes use of the old drive
difficult.
Dead motherboard? - An EPROM chip on the motherboard contains the password that unlocks
the hard drive. Without a working motherboard there are two ways to go about reviving the drive,
the only way to get the password from a dead motherboard is to de-solder the EPROM chip and
read it, another way to go would be to remove the EPROM chip on the hard drive and flash that
with an unlocked image from another drive. If the password is retrieved from the chip on the
motherboard, then using utilities it is possible to provide the password to the drive. In my
experience there is no universal software solution for unlocking the drive unless the password is
known.
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