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.