Microsoft Xbox 360 Development Kit Hard Drives (XDK) - Dat Discussion

General No-Intro related discussions.
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Seventy7
Posts: 5
Joined: 02 May 2018 20:25

Microsoft Xbox 360 Development Kit Hard Drives (XDK) - Dat Discussion

Post by Seventy7 »

https://datomatic.no-intro.org/index.ph ... arch&s=280

Quite a few full-hard drive dumps are in the wild for X360 dev kits, these hold many beta builds, but also the occasional unreleased title.

The decision to dat the full hard drives (rather than just individual betas) includes:
[*]Maintaining an untouched source.
[*]The hard drive img will also retain "deleted" files which can be recovered -- sometimes this can include full builds which would otherwise be forgotten.

Notes:
[*]While there are no "official" names for these devkit images, I'm largely datting them named as they're commonly found on the internet - but with cleanup to naming applied. For example 'BurgerKing-Kit.img' becomes 'Burger King.img'. Renaming is desireable as many of these Hard Drive images were distributed in a very disorganized manner (for example folder/img/json may be named differently for one particular rom). Please pay attention to file naming conventions as used in current entries in the dat. Due to naming ambiguity ALWAYS check the hash against the database before adding dumps.
[*]XDK hard drives are commonly compressed with .imgc: before datting, first decompress to .img
[*]Xbox 360 dev kits use a proprietary filesystem called "FAT X", you'll need special software to read the contents of this filesystem FATXTools is the free / open source / recommended software to use, though there seems to be some bugginess and I personally haven't had it work on my system.
[*]json files are generated by FATXTools which greatly slows down the loading time to file browse (as I am told) and thus, when a json file was available on the internet I have included it in the dat. Anyone with the initiative to help can also generate json files for the imgs missing them. As a result of desiring a json file to be included with every IMG, a Folder exists in the dat per-hard drive dump (to contain img+json).
[*]If you have any identifying pictures (such as the XDKs asset tag), please attach it to the entry.
[*]Xbox 360 Dev Kit Hard Drive Sizes: 20 is usually demo kit, 80 is older kits like xenons, 120 is newer kits like XNA, 250 is always slim. If IMG dumps appear at irregular sizes, there's a good chance that the HDD has an issue during it's dump and is a ad dump (but a bad dump is better than no dump).

I am by no means a 'definitive' expert on the subject of XDK's, so if you're an XDK collector / afficionado please consider helping / helming this project. There are probably OG Xbox dev kits out in the wild that need their own dedicated dat too, if you're familiar with these please consider starting a dat for them. XDK dumps / disorganized betas seem particularly vulnerable to being lost to time, so any help is appreciated and impactful.
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