I have a V1.0 Xbox with Xecuter 2.2 Lite and a Maxtor 120 Gig HD
at the moment i have slayers evox 2.5 and Gentoox V3.
I would like to be able to format and install xbmp as my dash and be able to select all games and apps including Gentoox from within Xbmp like you can in evox
I would also like to be able to do a native install of Gentoox this would give me an ideal system but can it be done?
Any help would be great thanks
While i'm here i would just like to say a big thankyou for all your hard work Shallax
The only real way to get the best of both worlds:
1) xbox as gaming machine (FATX partitions left intact)
2) xbox having one partition formatted as ReiserFS dedicated to GentooX
In your case, you cannot do that with a 120GB drive. You will need a drive that is larger that 137GB. That way you can setup Partition 7 (G:) as a native ReiserFS partition and manually relocate GentooX there.
Yes, that is correct. A 160GB drive would be a nice fit.
My xbox has a 200GB Maxtor drive (for DVD dumps), and getting GentooX off the loopback has led to a dramatic performance boost. Especially if you are still using KDE which hits the loopback partition hard. I now use XFCE4 (Thanks ShaLLaX!), which has mitigated a lot of the memory pressure and I/O.
The only remaining downside is the swap partition is still on loopback, but there is nothing that can be done with that right now unless you are adventurous enough to hack your lba48 bios patch code.
I only installed GentooX V3 a couple of days ago (been waiting for its release)
I installed it to E and used XFCE4 and this was the first time i seen a distro of linux running and was very impressed.
I switched to KDE just to see what it was like and was even more impressed. But the HD thrashing on both is a killer tbh and would really like a way of not looping back even for the swap partition.
Its a shame KDE is so slow because imo XFCE4 is a little too stripped down but then what do i know lol
1) hack the lba48 partition code. Look in the following directory, as in my case I use X2-4977 bios
XBtool\Patch Data\4977lba48
You would need to hexedit that file and manually adjust the partition values, then flash it into your modchip. This requires a good grasp on the low levels of partition table structures.
2) patching your Bios with the XBtool lba48 hack, and allowing it to utilize a partition table read from disk. This would require that you actually write a valid partition table to the disk, so that on next boot the one on disk will supercede the one embedded in the Bios. You must get the default Xbox partitions exact, or else it can cause problems for some games. How you partition the (F:) and possibly (G:) is up to you.
One word of advisement. I have a potential concern that Microsoft will start seeking out those extra partitions and games will refuse to run if those non-sanctioned partitions exist. I am surprised they are not doing so already since it would be a very cheap test to find hard drive mods. What would be more sinister is that if a partition anomaly is seen by the Xbox, that it will reinitialize the disk and wipe out your extra data not on an official partition.
Oh well, when that day comes, there will be a way to work around that as well, by turning off the modchip and booting with existing Bios. This is exactly why you must match 1:1 the default Xbox partitions exactly if you write the partition table to disk.
I don't have a large harddrive I am just using the stock 10Gb. My drive is partitioned with hda1 and hda2 in the space normally occupied by F. Is not possible to do the same thing with the space normally occupied by G. Is it not simply a matter of knowing the correct sector to start the hda1 partition at. That way you would have you 129Gb F drive on hda55 then two partiontions above that for hda1 and hda2.
If you keep an open mind, will your brain fall out?
