Xbox:XBpartitioner

This application is considered dangerous unless you know what you are doing. You can easily wipe your entire drive and render it unusable if you are on a softmod. It is highly recommended to back up your EEPROM with a system tools disc and FTP it to your PC before proceeding.

XBPartitioner is an application that will format Xbox partitions rewrite the parition table, and change hard drive cluster sizes.

Note that some users have had issues with F and G drives not being recognized on non-M8 BIOSes. It is recommended to use Chimp to format the drives.

Controls

• Back: See controls screen. Press Start to go back to the application. Press any other button to go back to your dashboard.
• A: Cycle through preset partition layouts. The presets are:
  • X Y Z
  • X Y Z
• B: Distribute space evenly to all partitions
• X: Change size / start sector
• White: Change operation, indicated in the top right corner.
  • Write & Format: Overwrite the partition table and format your drive. This will erase any data stored on your hard drive.
  • Write Only: Overwrite the partition table and not format your data.
  • Format: Only format your data. This will erase any data stored on your hard drive.
• Left Trigger: Increase partition size
• Right Trigger: Decrease partition size
• D-PAD Left: Increase partition size by 1GB
• D-PAD Right: Decrease partition size by 1GB
• Left Analog Stick: Change partition size (fine)
• Right Analog Stick: Enable/disable current partition
• Left+Right Analog Sticks: Undo all changes since last write
• Black: Erase partition table from disk
• Start: Begin operation. It will ask you to press Y to confirm.

Partitions

The listed partitions are as follows:

• 1 (E): Game save directory; also used as the default app install location.
• 2 (C): Operating system directory, do not modify anything here unless you know what you are doing.
• 3 (X): Cache drive. It is OK to format this.
• 4 (Y): Cache drive. It is OK to format this.
• 5 (Z): Cache drive. It is OK to format this.
• 6 (F): is an extra storage directory.
• 7 (G): is an extra storage directory, generally used if your HDD is bigger than 137GB.
• 8-14 (H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O): are memory cards or USB devices.

Formatting a Large Hard Drive

If you install a new hard drive that is larger than a standard (8GB/10GB) hard drive, whatever you used to set it up may not show the full capacity of the drive. You can use XBPartitioner to fix this, or to just reconfigure the sizes of your F and G drives.

1. With the new hard drive in, launch XBPartitioner and press A to cycle through the options to the desired configuration.
   • It is recommended to split the extra hard drive space evenly between the F and G drive to avoid potential file/folder limits of the filesystem.
2. Ensure that the top right corner says "Write & Format"; if not, press Y until it has this option selected.
3. For large drives, you will need to format each partition to have these cluster sizes or you will not be able to access all the space of a partition. Ensure for each partition you highlight, it follows this scheme:

• 16KB clusters for up to a 250GB partition
• 32KB clusters for a 250GB-500GB partition
• 64KB clusters for a 500GB-1TB partition

1. This step will wipe all data in the F and G drives. Press Start and then Y to confirm. The new drives should be usable now from your dashboard. If they do not appear, make sure the F and G drives are enabled in your dashboard's settings or, in the case of a modchip or TSOP flashed console, try flashing a BIOS that supports F and G drives (6th & 7th partitions).
2. If your new drive size doesn't show up . It seems that running XBPartitioner twice will fix it.
   • If a drive lists "ER" (error) before the drive size, you will need to format it again, or try formatting with Chimp. A trick that may work is to format the partitions with the bytes changed by a small amount, then format it back with the desired amount of bytes.
   • ADVANCED: If you want to make drive E larger, you will have to wipe the F and G partitions if they exist, using the right thumb button. This allows you to make E a larger size. It has been said not to go past the default BIOS limitation of 137GB, and this would also make the drive incompatible with stock BIOS. 120GB should be safe, although making drive E a larger 16 sector size appears to work, and be recognized by BIOSes supporting larger drives. However, keeping the size of E plus all other default drives under 137GB should retain compatibility with other BIOSes. Resizing Drive E will also cause drive E to be wiped. You will need to be sure that your BIOS can boot from drive C. NOT RECOMMENDED if you have a softmod, and if you haven't tested that your dash you placed on drive C will boot! And of course back up anything from any drive that will be wiped!

The Cromwell BIOS for Xbox has a hardcoded partition table that expects the E partition to be a certain size; it will not read partition tables created by XBPartitioner. Having drive E a different size than the default will cause E to not be recognized by a Linux bootloader with a standard configuration. This includes the loaders for linux-wrapped apps like Chimp and XMugen.