At long last, I return! This video kicks things off in what ended up becoming a six-parter. Over the next few videos we’ll be stepping through how to upgrade, or replace, the hard drive of an Xbox DVT4. The steps should be pretty similar on the DVT3 as far as I am aware.

To start things off we poke around the innards and get a feel for the design choices Microsoft made almost two decades ago. One interesting feature is the blocked connector at the rear, which helps distinguish this particular DVT4 from the earlier hardware. There’s also plenty of development hardware inside that you wouldn’t normally find in a retail Xbox.

That blocked rear connector is quite interesting. It looks a little like USB, but it isn’t a normal USB port, and there doesn’t appear to be much connected to it in this particular machine. There are also various unpopulated component positions on the motherboard, which make the differences between the development revisions rather interesting to examine.

First on the list of things to investigate was the clock battery. Fortunately, it hadn’t caused much damage to the surrounding components, and the machine was still functioning properly. I also had a look at the MCPX2 and some of the component positions marked on the board. Quite an interesting collection of hardware!

Breaking through the original seals wasn’t something I particularly enjoyed doing, especially on a development kit. Still, given the reputation of ageing Xbox clock capacitors and batteries, I thought it was better to inspect the hardware than leave a potential problem sitting there unnoticed.

I’d already been experimenting with a 120 GB SSD using a SATA-to-IDE adaptor. The drive fitted rather nicely, although getting the cables arranged inside the Xbox was becoming another matter entirely. I’d picked up a longer 80-conductor IDE cable to help with the installation.

There’s a rather awkward arrangement of cables inside this machine, including a separate connection for the optical drive. The original Thomson drive isn’t in the best condition either, so I wasn’t particularly worried about designing everything around continued use of that mechanism. The SSD itself fitted rather nicely in its adaptor, which was encouraging.

The original hard drive also provided a little entertainment when I accidentally put it into another Xbox and discovered that it would boot. There was plenty more to explore with the development firmware, recovery discs and drive configurations, but that’s what the rest of this series is for.

The development kit also has some interesting recovery and networking features. I’d been working with XDK recovery software and could update the development environment over the network, which was considerably more convenient than constantly moving storage devices between machines.

This is just a quick look inside the DVT4 before the larger storage project continues. There’s still cable routing, recovery software and a few more tests to work through, so I’ve certainly got enough material for the remaining videos!

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