Original XBox - Project Resurrection

One of the great thing about having worked with computers for longer than I can remember is owning a lot of old hardware. One of the sad things is looking back, with the benefit of hindsight, and realising how many great things I sold or gave away. On the great side is everything of note I've owned since around 2001. All the consoles and handhelds and phones and various bits of technology worth keeping (including the titular Xbox, which I'll get to in a second).

On the sad side lie my Commodore 64, Amiga 500, and the first PC I ever owned. I wish I still had them but they were given away, sold or scrapped for parts long long ago. Most likely they lie at the bottom of a landfill somewhere.

On the weekend I came across my old Xbox while looking for something totally unrelated and decided to resurrect it. The idea was to back up some of my old games to the hard drive and run them from there - many many years back I had this box chipped and installed a much larger hard drive from which I ran XBMC and an Amiga emulator. Everything went well to begin with, I browsed through media I hadn't watched for over a decade, I played Hunter on the Amiga emulator. Everything was looking cool. Until just now.

After a considerable amount of planning and set up (I needed cables, a router, a laptop) I could FTP back into my Xbox again. It was quite the nostalgia trip, I hadn't done this for...I have no no idea how long. I guess I was in my 30s, if not my late 20s! I had a back-up of Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance still knocking about so I started copying it and went back to my day job. About 5 minutes later, I heard it. The sound of death.

Click. Silence. Click.

Over and over.

The hard drive stepper was dying. Some frantic scrambling and I had the core files for Evolution and XMBC backed up. Phew. Next I started backing up the other content but it was laborious, I would copy a couple of hundred meg then the HDD would go back to clicking so I'd shut down and wait a few minutes then kick it off again. Eventually though...

So yeah. It died. Thing is, it all happened between starting the article a few hours ago and right now, when the red ring of death showed up. What a disappointment. On the upside I found a bunch of RAM while searching for stuff to use with this XBox project, and some of it fit my game server. At least I had some kind of win.

Where to next? I just ordered an IDE->SATA converter from Amazon which, according to the internet, works with my original Xbox. There are a few old SATA drives lying around the house, SSD and spinning, and I managed to back-up the most important files before the drive failed. I have a way forward. Project postponed until the converter arrives.