April 26th, 2026
I love the original Xbox. It’s one of my favorite consoles of all time. It has an energy that I absolutely adore. It’s also home to some of my favorite games ever (like Jet Set Radio Future. Love that game).
So I decided to take it apart and replace the IDE drive in it with a larger SATA drive. This is to document the wonderful journey I went on to swap it.
First, I had to buy some parts. I had to get a new 80 wire cable and an IDE->SATA adapter. The Xbox comes with a 40 wire cable, but it's not enough to support a SATA HDD. It’s also intended to work with IDE drives, so the adapter was needed.
So I bought those, they arrived…now the fun began.
It was very annoying to fold the IDE cable to get it to actually sit in the Xbox. I bought a 24 inch (about 60 cm) cable, so it was kind of big. Definitely not intended to work with the Xbox. BUT after getting some help with it, the cable was folded, and the drive was powered on.
And it didn’t work.
I thought that maybe something wasn’t hooked up, but no. Everything was. It just was not working. So I took out all of the parts and went to bed. This was last night, before this post goes up.
When I woke up this morning, I decided to try and reformat the drive with FatXplorer. Maybe something went wrong when I formatted it a few weeks ago. I reformatted, locked it, and put it back in the Xbox.
Miraculously, it worked!
Genuinely don’t know what happened before that made it not work. Reformatting seemed to do the trick. Now I had to get the softmod set up back up and get all of my game saves and DLC transferred back over via FTP. Such an annoying process.
Remember when I said I love the Xbox? Correction: I love the Xbox when I don’t have to open it up and fix it or upgrade it. Now that I’ve got a new drive, it should be able to last a bit longer. Maybe more hours of Psychonauts for me (by the time anybody reads this post, I will be continuing my journey of 100%ing that game. Pain and suffering, more so than getting the Xbox drive replaced).
All the best, Nikki
Have any comments? Concerns? Email me!
