how to mod xbox by the hard drive, no ar/memory card/router network? (back up)/add saves files

[scrapjack]

I picked up an xbox cheaply recently and I"m curious about modding my xbox to run backup games as I know well the anger when my favorite discontinued game disk is no longer readable, it has happened several times. (I am the only person that can touch my disks now) the problem is I do not have an ar for the xbox, link cables and would need a cable longer then 100 feet to link it to the network here and I don't really care about online gaming enough to buy that cable. What I do have is plenty of hard drive enclosures, that is devices used to make internal hard drives into external. i opened mine to clean it and figured I should be able to use an adapter or plug the hard drive in asw a secondary in one of my towers, and simply copy and paste save files to the correct folder, and make back ups in the future. While I'm at it I should be able to edit a file some where in notepad or replace it all together to remove what ever copyright tactics they used. it seems that should be simple but I could not find anything. does anyone have a suggestion, also those memory cards are expensive, I have 7 for my ps2 I need to back up, an week ago a hard drive in one of my towers failed so backing up data very nice. Does anyone have any advice on running mods directly through the hard drive, or the path to the game saves when being viewed as a secondary/external drive on a pc?


!UPDATE!
ok, I plugged the hard drive into an adapter to my win7 laptop and it installed the drivers automatically and then nothing happened, then I broke the power cable on my adapter, I'll have to solder that later... plugged it into my windows xp tower, it was recognized, shows as working properly in device manager, and . . . shows up no where else. My google search this time was more helpful, apparently they are formatted with fatx and locked so I'd need a program to read the files, boot up the xbox, then hot swap the hard drive ide cable. All the sites I'm seeing for reading the xbox drives are suggesting ways to reformat it for a pc(that doesn't make sense for a 10gb unless they want to run win95 or older), but that isn't what I'm after. . . the search continues, apparently there are many programs for reading fatx format, I saw at least 5.

[Zorlon]

http://forums.afterdawn.com/threads/...our-pc.554094/

there is plenty of info online that is just one source

never used that method myself as I have an action replay for the brick anyway and once you have the xbox key you can just unlock the drive clone it or rebuild it to a large drive and lock it again (That is done with a simple Linux CD-R that you can boot from an old IDE PC) or you can do just about that same things directly on an Xbox with software made for that though I never got it to work after the hot swap that I did do some testing with, but went back to the IDE PC method instead and it worked first time

I have a 750GB drive in my Xbox replacing the 8GB drive that it came with

[scrapjack]

I liked my action replays for the ds while they worked, but at $30 each I wish I didn't have so many turn into blank chips.
this link seems good, however I haven't had much experience with linux. It said, "Making the XBoxHDM C
After you get Shademand's kit, copy all the files from the "C" folder into the "C" folder of linux in XBoxHDM. Create the ISO and burn it with you fav software.
Now you have the CD you need to mod your XBox!" that first line is confusing, since in windows the c-drive is the primary hard drive by default. Is what they are saying simply to extract Shademand's kit then burn it to a disk right? The copy from c folder to c folder part is also kinda odd.

[Zorlon]

You miss read something there, though not that clear, it says

Making the XBoxHDM C
After you get Shademand's kit, copy all the files from the "C" folder into the "C" folder of linux in XBoxHDM. Create the ISO and burn it with you fav software.
Now you have the CD you need to mod your XBox!

I would of thought they are talking about the C folder inside of the Shademand's kit and copy it to the C folder of the XBoxHDM files, there is no mention of Drives

And you are burning XBoxHDM not the Shademand's kit

I found it a little worrying that there is a mention of the original Dash not being accessable, though there are very few reasons that you would need access to that