Anyone who’s owned a game console from the last couple of generations will tell you that the machines are becoming increasingly like set-top computers — equipped with USB ports, Bluetooth, removable hard drives, and their own online software repositories. But while this overlap theoretically offers considerable benefits, such as the ability to use your own USB controller rather than being stuck with the system’s default, the manufacturers haven’t always been so accommodating.
Take for example the removable hard drive of the Xbox 360. It was a bog standard 2.5″ SATA drive inside a fancy enclosure, but as explained by [Eaton], Microsoft went to considerable lengths to prevent the user from upgrading it themselves. Which wouldn’t have been such a big deal, if the Redmond giant wasn’t putting a huge markup on the things; even in 2005, $99 USD for 20 GBs was highway robbery.
An Xbox 360 Hard Drive
So how did the drive lockout work? Genuine Xbox drives had an RSA-signed “security sector” at sector 16, which contained information like the drive’s serial number, firmware revision, and model number. The RSA signature would prevent tampering with the fields stored in the security sector, and you couldn’t simply copy this sector over to a blank drive, because when the console compared the data with what the drive self-reported, it wouldn’t match.
Of course, industrious hackers did eventually figure out some workarounds. A DOS tool called HDDHackr was created which would let you plug in whatever identifying information you wanted into drives from Western Digital. All one had to do was grab a copy of a security sector from the se ..
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