My xbox has been softmodded, gotten a bigger harddrive, and had it's controller modded. Now that I have it perfect, it's starting to mess up! First, a strange "V" partition has appeared on my harddrive. Anything I try to burn with DVD2Xbox fails, it will either fail to burn one file (Doom 3, Splinter Cell: Double Agent), will hang at the intro and not play (Greg Hastings Tournament Paintball), or give me the dirty disc error (Timesplitters: Future Perfect). It also won't access the server to update it's dashboard. Can anyone help me out with any of this??

There is some strange malware about. Have a look in the V partition (which certainly should not be there unless it relates to the dash update process) and then delete it. You may have to mod this again, or at least replace everything with clean versions.

Bogus dash files can cause the disk errors, but also try cleaning the laser.

Whenever I try to look at the V partition, it resets the file explorer, so I can't look inside it. Even when I tell it to delete it, it won't go away. What should I do to return my harddrive to it's original condition?

Well you can do a "restore to factory" from most softmod installer disks, but first make very sure you have backed up your eeprom files to your pc.

As long as you have those files you can use xboxhdm to rebuild the drive any way you want. I would suggest having a look around for C4RN1 who has a set of C: files for restoring softmods, and chunkheads drive rebuilding guides which are excellent.. including the hotswap guide, which may be easier.

Did you get this problem fixed? It sounds like theres some odd linux file that modifys a partition or something. If i were you i would make sure you have your eeprom backed up and then nuke the hard drive to make sure there's nothing odd on it. Usually unwanted issues are located in the mbr.

So...

I've uploaded a hard drive nuker for you, it's better to be safe than sorry and have this be a reoccurring problem.

Dban hard drive nuker
Just run the executable file and create a dban boot disk. Unlock your hard drive using xboxhdm. Then unplug any hard drive you don't want to mess with and boot the dban boot disk. It might take a couple hours to totally nuke your drive but when it's done you can be sure there will be nothing left. You'll have to reformat the drive to fat X and rebuild the hard drive using xboxhdm.
If you want to use my modded C: files i've included a link in my sig.

Good luck, and if you have any questions let me know.

I use active@killdisk.. same effect.

Fascinating problem.. could it be related to the malware which wiped out F: partitions on internet connected machines a couple of months ago?
It would be interesting to run something like clamAV (linux antivirus) on the drive just to see if there is anything which stands out.

I can confirm that no linux distros (or anything else) should make a V partition.