Gentoox native install with modchip/dash and < 137GB driv

Telek · Post by **Telek** » Sun May 29, 2005 11:47 pm

Ok, don't flame me if this has been beaten to death, but I haven't been able to find any info on it other than "it can't be done" which I don't believe...

I have some xboxen that I wish to put a native install of Gentoox on, but still be able to load the dash and play games. Now I can fdisk and parition the drive nicely and do an install and boot into gentoox off of the CD and it is a lot faster than loopback install. Unfortunately evox doesn't seem to support this as it keeps nuking the partition table, which renders gentoox unbootable. It also restores F to take up the rest of the disk, which is undesireable.

So basically how do I do this? I know if I had a 160GB drive I could do this easily, and this is because of the LBA48 mod... So my question is why can't I do this on a drive < 137GB? Just like the nkpatcher mod which allows you to do this with a softmod, you should be able to do this with a normal mod / evox / etc, right? I just can't seem to figure out how...

Any help would be appreciated... Thanks!

Trevante · Post by **Trevante** » Sun May 29, 2005 11:58 pm

I think there are some apps that will let you define the F and G partition sizes, allowing you to have a G drive on a HDD less than 137GB. Go to xbox-scene and ask about xbpartitioner (I think that's the name of the program, don't know cuz I never used it) and they should be able to give you more info.

WisdomWolf · Post by **WisdomWolf** » Mon May 30, 2005 12:11 am

the biggest problem is having a dash and applications that support reading a partition table from disk. If you repartition with xbpartitioner you need to make sure that all of your apps will be able to read this new modified partition stucture. Otherwise you either won't have access to your files or you will end up writing over the gentoox partition. Therefore it is easier to just buy a bigger hard drive to avoid those possible problems.

At least that's the way I understand it.

maestro485 · Post by **maestro485** » Mon May 30, 2005 1:05 am

I was having a hard time with the Gentoox install due to the 40gb HD I had not having the standard xbox partitions. I was able to get it running using the X3 bios instead of evox. If you power on your xbox without a disc in it, X3 boots to a dashboard that includes a utility to partition the disc accordingly. Although I haven't tried it yet, I'm pretty sure you can play games with the X3 bios too.

Hope this helps.

Matt

Telek · Post by **Telek** » Mon May 30, 2005 1:36 am

The problem that I am finding is that Evox doesn't like the normal partition table -- I guess the xbox uses a different partition format. So it will assign all space to the F drive which can cause overwriting problems.

How was the LBA48 support added into evoxdash? Is the source code for that available anywhere? Can it be hacked just like nkpatcher was?

I don't have an X3 chip, and from what I understand the X3 bios only works on the X3 chip, right?

Telek · Post by **Telek** » Tue May 31, 2005 4:07 pm

Ok, FATX is a relatively simple file system.. Couldn't we just "allocate" a large area in the filesystem (without actually writing a file there) that corresponds to the location of the partition that you have created on disk?