Just today my X-box started slowing down a TON. It's doing it whether I have the chip inside on or off. It's an X2Pro. Got a 200 gig HD in there as well. My guess is that the HD is crashing or dying. But I want to be sure before I decide to buy a new drive and go through all this hassle. Things are just REALLY slow lately, I hear the hard drive crunch but it's SLOW. Avalaunch is my default dash and it takes about twice as long as normal to boot up the box now. Loading XBMC from there used to take around 5 seconds, now it's taking around 30 seconds or more. Halo 2, I tried today from the disc and it was TERRIBLY slow, like crawling trying just to get to the live menu, and the box/drive couldn't even keep up with party chat in the pregame lobby. I was pretty much dead in the water. Also, I have an Xbox Live acct on this box, it's all legit, and legit Halo 2. I turn the chip off to play. I am worried though, I have heard if the box id/hard drive id changes, I get an immediate ban. If this is true, is there any way around this? I never intended to change the drive, but if it's crashed, I have no choice! I noticed in Halo that not only was my Live user there, but ALSO 2 other users with 001 and 002 after them (this looks like the checksum sort of error you get when you do a scandisk and orphaned files are found, which screamed hard drive problems to me). The drive doesn't SOUND any different than usual, but it is running a lot more, sort of "chugging" along if you know what I mean. Like it's having trouble seeking out the files it needs. To me, relating it to a PC, it sounds like a badly fragmented hard drive would in a pc (or the noise the defragging process in a PC makes). So, does that sound like a bad drive? What I'd love to do is take the thing out and shove it in a PC to check it out. There an easy way to do that? Even if I have to lose all my files, I can easily run slayers install or something and get it back up. Oh, and while I'm at it -- I read somewhere else that these problems can happen with large drives with no G. My drive is just one large F partition, I think it's a 200 or a 250. I did flash my X2 bios to support larger drives, but did I mess something up when I made F too large a partition? Maybe THAT'S my problem? Oh, and finally, is there any space limit if I need to buy a new drive? Can I go 300 or higher? If anyone's heard of this before. and has some suggestions or things to try, please let me know. Thanks a ton for taking the time to read this. BDP.
I was having a similar problem, started a couple of weeks ago - slow boots, slowing of program start-ups etc etc. Suffice to say yesterday i get the 'error code' screen 09 - hard drive fault. Now nothing works and from what I can gather everything will be lost and I need to replace the hard drive. I'd have a good read through these forums and quickly back up anything you can. I believe you will be able to get the password from the old hard drive to prepare the new one correctly - not once it dies completely though!
