Upgrade your Xbox 360's hard drive on the cheap

Save money by upgrading your 20GB Xbox 360 hard drive to 120GB without buying Microsoft's overpriced add-on.

Remove Your Xbox 360 Drive


With this slightly tricky hack, you can save a bundle while boosting your game console's storage capacity to hold more music, video, and other media files.
You'll need a DOS installation on a writable flash thumb drive for this hack. (The utility doesn't work under Windows, and you'll also be disconnecting your PC's hard drive.) First, grab a spare USB thumb drive and copy the HP Drive Key Boot Utility to it. The utility is designed for HP flash drives, but it works on other types of flash drives, too. Also download and mount a DOS image file.
This hack is designed to work with a specific drive, the 120GB Western Digital Scorpio, model number WDGWD1200BEVS. You'll be replacing the drive's native firmware with Xbox-recognized firmware. You can track down the firmware online by doing a search for "hddss.bin 120 Xbox 360." Place the hddss.bin file in the root of your DOS thumb drive.
Once you have these items and files ready, begin the upgrade by removing your Xbox 360's hard drive from the game console.
(Just don't expect us to get you a new Xbox 360 if it all goes wrong!)

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