MCE Help

[Chinny]

I edited the mceinstaller script (v1.1) and changed my starting sector to what used to be the starting sector of my G partition, fired up MCE, ran "Stardust" and let it do its thing. B/C I changed the starting sector I ignored the format warning and let the script run its source. When I got to the gentoox portion I wasn't able to install (only had 4.6g free on my E partition - probably b/c of XBMC). Shut down my xbox. Restarted and booted through the MCE disk and ran "Native". Everything decompressed. Shut down and restarted. I quickly realized that my F Drive was formatted (much to my suprise but realized that's it's all still there. Now, having changed the starting sector nothing *should* be overwritten (right?). A Couple questions for the pros -

1) Can I install gentoox natively through the home cd (v3.2) or do I have to reinstall via the MCE disk?
2) Can I access my old F Drive through gentoox? If not - How?
3) Did I follow the install process correctly? (Boot MCE disk, run stardust, reboot MCE disk, run native)

I appreciate all of your help - especially nobspangle. If you can help me jump this last hurdle, I'd be a very happy man. I'd be happy to donate all of my gmail, wallop, and freehosting123 to my savior.

Thanks again,
Chinny

[ShALLaX]

Wrong forum, again.

[Chinny]

bump anyone?

Everything's a little strange on my F Drive. I mounted hda55 on /mnt/fatx/f but when I listed the partition everything came up as ASCII. So I jumped into fdisk and listed all the partitions. Everything is exactly where it should be - all of the partitions start where I wanted them to - so they're not going to overwrite any of my data.

I originally created my partitions with xbpartitioner so that I could reformat with 32k clusters. Apparently my (xb)partitiontable is erased (I verified this through xbpartition).

I haven't seen anyone else have the problems I'm having. Technically I should still be able to see the files on the F partition through evox/ftp since fdisk setup everything right where I wanted it to. But all I'm seeing is garbage when I mount the drive and list, and nothing when I ftp in through my dash

I've narrowed down the possible problems to these

1) MCE isn't able to mount my drive b/c its lba48? (But why would I be unable to see the files through evox then?)
2) My F drive up to sector 556580192 is raw and unpartitioned
3) My drive is corrupted b/c of the fact that I wrote past the 250 gig border (I've heard people had problems even though they formatted the partition with 32k clusters)

I am seriously clueless here. Please help me brainstorm here, I'll be your best friend. Seriously

[wHack]

I've had the same problems and am looking into it as well but don't have alot of time at the moment due to school. I'm sure there is a way to circumvent it but I'm not sure yet as to how. Hopefully nobspangle or Shallax can and will shed some light on the matter

[Chinny]

Thank God I'm not alone.

I'm going to be out of town and away from my xbox until Friday Afternoon. So I won't be able to debug. But as soon as I get back I'm going to try to crack this nut

[Chinny]

Got back today and did a little bit of work on getting everything back to working condition. I was thinking that perhaps the garbage on hda55 was b/c of the fact that MCE didn't support LBA48, so I installed Home - Big mistake. Even though I changed the starting sectors for the install, I didn't remove the parts of the scripts that zeros out the first sector of my F Drive. Long story short = No more f Drive. Took me all day, but finally I copied the fatx signature from another partition and recreated my F Drive.

I came across a post about "garbled" data that may fix your problem though. You may have to go into fdisk and create a new partition that is identical to the way your partition was originally setup - you need to know the starting and ending sectors. Only problem is in setting the drive type. Someone said that they were able to get things working by setting the drive to type e1 (Dos).

Edit::
I haven't -yet- had any success with using fdisk to recognize the drive. Are you able to see files on your F drive when you are in evox? Also - how big is your HD?

[wHack]

well further complications have hit me. First off I have an X3 which is great b/c it'll set up you're drive and partition it for you all from the bios config. But not so great because they rewrite you're partition table to whatever the bios is set to on boot, and they only have a few options. I didn't realize this before. So I have to rebuild my install disk with the new patch for thew 137Gb F as opposed to a 200Gb. Did that and the install is failing every tim so now I need to re-burn the disk. No big deal just haven't done it yet.

Yeah and my drive is a 250Gb.

[Chinny]

Okay, that's good - since your drive is 250 I know you were getting corruption due to writing over the 250 limit.

Were you able to see your files through evox?

Also - I tried to repartition through linux (so that I could mount and see the files) but it was a no go - still see trash when I list the partition. Let me know if your x3 disk works

[wHack]

nope couldn't see anything under evox but once I was able to load my dash from it

[Chinny]

After reading a couple of posts by oz_paulb (the first guy to break the 137gb barrier) I found out that the F drive appears empty b/c the partition table is incorrect.

Therefore, if you can restore the partition table to exactly what it was before you installed MCE - you SHOULD be able to see your F Drive again. I'm testing now.

[Chinny]

FIXED IT

You must define you partition table (through xbparitioner) to exactly the same way it was before you installed MCE.

Now, the problem I had was b/c of the fact that I formatted my F partition with 32k clusters to prevent data corruption. There is no way to define that through xbpartitioner, so I had to hexedit the drive and change the offset.

Long story short, you probably don't have a problem with the size of your clusters. All you have to do is define your partition sizes to exactly the same state as they were before.

[wHack]

Yeah my problem was compounded by the fact I was doing custom partition sizes which doesn't work with my bios on my X3 chip. It just rewrites the partition table to whatever it is set to on boot.