Play legit Xbox 360 games from hard drive without the disk??

[silbeej]

So i own my xbox games, i didn't download them or steal them or what not. All i'd like to do is play my few games without having to switch the disks, for they are getting scratched a lot, some already bad. Is there a way to play the games on my HD without inserting the disk, kind of like a no cd patch on the PC?

[alansmallen]

So i own my xbox games, i didn't download them or steal them or what not. All i'd like to do is play my few games without having to switch the disks, for they are getting scratched a lot, some already bad. Is there a way to play the games on my HD without inserting the disk, kind of like a no cd patch on the PC?

Ya. I wanted to know the same.

[EV0LUTION]

the only way you could do that is by modding it.

[NoSmokingBandit]

If you have Syphon Filter and a usb->xbox adapter you can mod your box and copy the games right over. I have a modded box witha 200gb drive in it with movies, games, and all sort of goodies on it. Google "xbox softmod" and there will be tons of resources to help you out.

[alansmallen]

If you have Syphon Filter and a usb->xbox adapter you can mod your box and copy the games right over. I have a modded box witha 200gb drive in it with movies, games, and all sort of goodies on it. Google "xbox softmod" and there will be tons of resources to help you out.

I just want to be able to a) play online and b) get tech support

[EV0LUTION]

I just want to be able to a) play online and b) get tech support

then your going to have to take care of your disks. sorry mate..

[upsguy27]

If you have Syphon Filter and a usb->xbox adapter you can mod your box and copy the games right over. I have a modded box witha 200gb drive in it with movies, games, and all sort of goodies on it. Google "xbox softmod" and there will be tons of resources to help you out.

Wrong Xbox...

[NoSmokingBandit]

Wrong Xbox...

I just realized that :\
My bad, haha!

[iCheese]

the new xbox software update allows you to run your games from the hard drive, but many games warn that doing this will lower performance to unacceptable levels, such as halo 3.

[dukebound85]

the new xbox software update allows you to run your games from the hard drive, but many games warn that doing this will lower performance to unacceptable levels, such as halo 3.

that makes no sense to me as a hard drive is loads faster than an optical drive. care to explain?

[upsguy27]

that makes no sense to me as a hard drive is loads faster than an optical drive. care to explain?

It's because the games that are out right now aren't optimized to run from the hard drive; they are meant to load directly from the disc. This causes them to run slower. When games come out that are optimized to run from the hard drive, they will load faster.

[angelneo]

It's because the games that are out right now aren't optimized to run from the hard drive; they are meant to load directly from the disc. This causes them to run slower. When games come out that are optimized to run from the hard drive, they will load faster.
I can't seem to get my head around this. I don't see a difference between loading from a disc and loading from a hard disk. In all scenarios, doesn't hard disk load faster?

[upsguy27]

I can't seem to get my head around this. I don't see a difference between loading from a disc and loading from a hard disk. In all scenarios, doesn't hard disk load faster?

The disc looks for the data on the disc first, so it goes to read the disc for the data first, and when it doesn't find it there, it goes to the hard drive. The slower speeds come from it looking for the data on the disc first, instead of going directly to the hard drive.

[dukebound85]

It's because the games that are out right now aren't optimized to run from the hard drive; they are meant to load directly from the disc. This causes them to run slower. When games come out that are optimized to run from the hard drive, they will load faster.

i dont undertand your reasoning tbh. what do you mean by optimized? i mean you could say the same thing about installing os's as they are meant to be installed off a dvd. however i can install it off a thumb drive and its loads faster to do. all it takes is a software fix to change this, which is what they did right?

The disc looks for the data on the disc first, so it goes to read the disc for the data first, and when it doesn't find it there, it goes to the hard drive. The slower speeds come from it looking for the data on the disc first, instead of going directly to the hard drive.

doesnt the software update from MS make that point invalid? surely they would have code in there to bypass the optical drive if you select a game off the hard drive to play

i mean, they did release a software update to give this functionality if the following quote is indeed true

you have links by chance that support what youre saying?

the new xbox software update allows you to run your games from the hard drive, but many games warn that doing this will lower performance to unacceptable levels, such as halo 3.
i just dont get the unbolded part

[kingamar]

well thats a load of cr@p there is no optimization involved a game will only run as fast as the source the media is read from in which case the HDD is far faster than the optical drive, its the same as the psp when people use custom firmware to play games from their memory sticks (this can have a negative affect too but thats due to games being in cso format compressed and ofcourse memory sticks with poor read and wrirte speeds) disc load times are pretty much emliminated as well as not having the hum or buzz of the disc drive...this also saves power and as mentioned somewhere before reduces wear and tear of the optical drive, all games are usually in a ISO format on most if not all consoles so the console will always read the file the same no matter what the source be it HDD or disc of course microsoft will correct any issues of the xbox looking for the optical drive first for the game with a patch file of some kind if such a problem exists.

I personally think its not good to do this if people still only have 20Gb hard drives, but ofcourse the bigger HDD's microsoft offer come with a big price tag, I personally would like to see microsoft allowing people to use usb hard drives to save their games onto because even 120Gb can seem small to a hardcore gamer with a huge game library.

[NoSmokingBandit]

The new 360 update will still require you to put the original disc in the drive so you cant go all willy nilly copying your friends games.

[alansmallen]

The new 360 update will still require you to put the original disc in the drive so you cant go all willy nilly copying your friends games.

Was hoping you wouldn't say that.

[upsguy27]

i dont undertand your reasoning tbh. what do you mean by optimized? i mean you could say the same thing about installing os's as they are meant to be installed off a dvd. however i can install it off a thumb drive and its loads faster to do. all it takes is a software fix to change this, which is what they did right?



doesnt the software update from MS make that point invalid? surely they would have code in there to bypass the optical drive if you select a game off the hard drive to play

i mean, they did release a software update to give this functionality if the following quote is indeed true

you have links by chance that support what youre saying?


i just dont get the unbolded part

I'll let this link (http://admin.bungie.net/News/content.aspx?type=news&cid=16252)explain everything.

[zameen]

If you have Syphon Filter and a usb->xbox adapter you can mod your box and copy the games right over. I have a modded box witha 200gb drive in it with movies, games, and all sort of goodies on it. Google "xbox softmod" and there will be tons of resources to help you out.

hey can u pls tell me how to flash the CD drive & and to mod 360

[Dagless]

that makes no sense to me as a hard drive is loads faster than an optical drive. care to explain?

No its true, and it's caused by data streaming. It's all about data placement and streaming. If you want to check it out try Halo 3 or (best of all) GTA IV. I used to run it from the HDD and had to put up with loading issues all the friggin time - you can't drive fast without severe popup. A friend told me to run it from DVD and it worked perfectly.
The initial load times are longer from DVD but its better in-game.

well thats a load of cr@p
No, it's not.

But OP there's no legal way to do this. You can buy Xbox 360 games for download though, through Xbox Live. If you didn't want to damage disks (you'd avoid them completely) then go down that route.

[NoSmokingBandit]

hey can u pls tell me how to flash the CD drive & and to mod 360

I have no idea. I was going to do my friend's but it requires a specific sata chipset or something on your computer and it just seemed like too much of a mess. Imo, its not worth losing the warranty, especially on something as unreliable as the 360. If its already out of warranty i would just go for it, but you may need to buy a pci sata card. Theres tons of guides on about it, just google it.

[Sdashiki]

I have no idea. I was going to do my friend's but it requires a specific sata chipset or something on your computer and it just seemed like too much of a mess. Imo, its not worth losing the warranty, especially on something as unreliable as the 360. If its already out of warranty i would just go for it, but you may need to buy a pci sata card. Theres tons of guides on about it, just google it.

better yet, craigslist search for your friendly local flasher...theyre out there.

[NoSmokingBandit]

Im always the guy who gets paid to hack, not the other way around, lol. I dont advertise though. My friends bring me their friends psps and xboxs for me to mod and throw me a few dollars even though i dont ask for it.
I like to learn it myself so if something goes wrong i know better how to fix it. I've always been a hands-on kinda guy.

[kobachi]

No its true, and it's caused by data streaming. It's all about data placement and streaming.

I can't believe everyone's ridiculous theories on this. Here's the truth: Halo 3, and presumably other games, already cache the current level, etc. to the HD. This was in the game from the beginning, and is why the optical drive doesn't go crazy with random seeks while you're in-game. The problem is that the code that caches to the HD was written before the time that the install-to-HD feature was developed. So if you install the game to the HD, it will still cache to the HD. This is a huge performance hit, because the game is double-caching to the same drive. Reading and writing to the same hard drive is much slower than reading from one source (in this case, the DVD) and writing to another. You can see this manifested, for example, in the difference between the time it takes to copy a file from one physical hard drive to another vs. the time it takes to copy a file from one partition to another on the same hard drive.

The real problem is that Bungie is too lazy/money-grubbing to develop the relatively simple patch that would say "am I already running on the HD? Ok, then I don't need to cache the game data again." But they have already moved on to ODST and beyond and aren't interested in improving Halo 3 anymore.

[zlanich]

Does it make any sense at all to say the game caches to the HDD at all considering you can play any game without the HDD even attached at all? I'm thinking it caches to the ram only minus game saves which clearly can't take place w/o a HDD?:confused:

[NoSmokingBandit]

Halo 3 caches stuff to the hdd, but if one isnt present it just doesnt cache anything. It only helps load times, the game doesnt rely on the hdd being present.

I read once where a guy tested Halo 3's loading times on different 360 hdds and found that the larger drives cut loading time almost in half because of the larger cache on the drive itself and faster transfer rate. One would have to assume that no hdd only increases load times even more.

[RBRat3]

Well cache is cache no matter how you look at it, if the feature is there its gonna use it wether on cd or hdd. Even pc games will cache to the hdd when its installed to the hdd especially with low ram but it will still do it with a large amount. Is it a performence decrease yes and no, I can see how it can slow down loading times a wee bit from being accessed at the same time. But you also need to see that games do utilize compression and is a good reason cache exists. consider loading, the hdd will unpack the required files into cache and files the that need to be loaded into memory and readily accessable files will be thrown into ram. This does improve game performence in a way have you ever noticed while your playing a game on the 360 useing a cd that textures seem to get replaced at the last second that in comes into view and you get to see the switch between the low res and high res texture. on the hdd since the game to cache and ram is constant the anomaly should be non-existant tho useing the cd does the same order but due to a reading bottleneck it happens every now and then, nothing is ever perfect. Where the claim that games were optimized to be ran off the cd is true, but running a game off the hdd is not a perfomence decrease but a slight improvement. The games are designed and optimized around the fact that reading off the cd is slower than ****.

[xenocide100588]

The disc looks for the data on the disc first, so it goes to read the disc for the data first, and when it doesn't find it there, it goes to the hard drive. The slower speeds come from it looking for the data on the disc first, instead of going directly to the hard drive.

Actually, this is incorrect... the disc is only read to verify the security code at the beginning... basically saying "Yes... this is <insert game name here>". Once that is done, the optical drive stops and the game loads from the HD. I've noticed significant performance INCREASE when loading from the drive instead of the dvd. Of course, I'm using the new 360 Slim model... although I doubt that has anything to do with it... The only difference I can see is that the internal xbox360 hard drive on the slim is straight SATA II instead of running a modded USB/SATA combo like the old HD was in the series 1-3.

The older xbox360 games... such as Halo 3 and such are not optimized for harddrive install.. and therefor will naturally be a little slower... however, I recently installed TES IV: Oblivion to the harddrive and noticed RIDICULOUSLY fast loading times... as with both L4D games and both Modern Warfare games....

Hope that helps..

... just a thought.... why doesn't bungie release a patch once in a while instead of not updating HALO 3 in months!!

[chesterb]

My suggestion (and i did this myself today), is to get the discs buffed (i hate doing this) and then install them. The 360 seems to use the disc as an identifier only, and then runs from hdd (as someone has stated). My Borderland disc had a deep scratch right around the outside of the disc, making the game unplayable, then i made it a whole lot worse by trying the "toothpaste trick" to buff the discs (note to everyone, don't try the toothpaste trick). The end result was me taking a very scratched borderlands disc to block buster, they buffed it & got all the small scratches out, but the deep one was still there, however it managed to install and now, i can play the game with no issues, it reads the disc one to start, then it's all HDD.

[viper73]

The one that said that games run slower on the hard drive than on the optical drive, you are an idiot!!! Most optical drives today run at about 10mbps read speed. If you haven't noticed yet, the hard drives on the xbox 360 are SATA. They run at between 100 and 300mbps. And when you said it looks on the optical drive first and then the hard drive, all wrong. Ever notice the button on the screen saying "Play from HDD"? There is a reason why it is there. To play the game from the hard drive obviously. The only reason the disk is in the optical drive is for verification that the game is not illegal and that you actually own it. I happen to know a lot about computers and electronics. I also know that the xbox 360 is a computer in itself. So I can tell you right now, you don't even know what you are talking about. Unless you absolutely know what you're talking about and have facts to back it up, don't fill other people's brains with your BS theories.

[lewis82]

Chill out, man... this thread is two years old :rolleyes:

[jmc548]

Was hoping you wouldn't say that.

Hey I was wondering: If the Xbox requires the original disc as a key to launch the copy that's stored in the hard drive, couldn't a copy be made of the original disc? The xbox isn't going to be playing what's on the disc, it only needs to match the title on the disc to the version that's on the xbox. That's just my theory. Do you or anyone else know if this is a possible option?

[Nermal]

A copied disk will fail the verification.