How to Play Games off 2 USB External Hard Drives ?

[misterymoi 2]

I had FreeStyle BSD working on my xbox 360 with 2 (1TB) external USB Hard Drives and the games loaded fine from either of them.  It was years ago, but I remember setting up the launch.ini to recognize both usb drives with one being the primary.  I don't remember the settings because that got lost when the main 1 TB USB Drive failed. 

 

So since it had been a while since I had done any updates, I went ahead and updated the kernel to 17502 with Dashlaunch 3.17 and installed Aurora 0.5b.  I was going to configure Freestyle 3 but decided to give Aurora a try and I love it.  I have it configured for the most part.  Since I was too impatient to wait until I reloaded all the games I lost on the 2nd 1 TB, I went ahead and set up Aurora with just 1 of the 1TB USB hard drives and then plugged in the 2nd one after it had already installed.  I configured the dashlaunch to start Aurora and got all the drives and games recognized.  However, the games will now only launch from the first 1TB usb drive that I setup.  It will not launch when I select a game on the 2nd drive.  I keep getting the error message that "The game couldn't start.  Try downloading the game again..."  I know the games work fine because I can start a game it if I copy it on the usb that launches the games fine.  I just don't have that much space left.  I have searched the forums for a week now trying to find out what the launch.ini should look like to recognize both USB drives but I have not found the solution.

 

Is there a solution?  I was wondering if the issue is that I setup Aurora with just one of the drives recognized and if I were to erase it and start all over again, if that would solve the issue?  I really hope there is a launch.ini setting because I spent a lot of time getting covers and screenshots for a bunch of stuff that was missing them and don't really want to do that again.  I suppose if I have to, I will and it looks like I can save the database settings.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

-M

[scorpNZ 207]

Drives have to be on the usb port they were originally scanned with as the path to the games will be wrong.In your post above you mention adding the 2nd 1tb after but no mention of whether the games were scanned & if they were scanned then they will launch from the usb port you had it on

[Swizzy 2083]

Drives have to be on the usb port they were originally scanned with as the path to the games will be wrong.In your post above you mention adding the 2nd 1tb after but no mention of whether the games were scanned & if they were scanned then they will launch from the usb port you had it on

In Aurora it doesn't matter if they're in port 1, 2, 3 etc. infact, it doesn't matter in FSD either... what matters is that they were put in the correct order... (for FSD) Aurora on the other hand is more intelligent and will identify the device by it's ID

[misterymoi 2]

Drives have to be on the usb port they were originally scanned with as the path to the games will be wrong.In your post above you mention adding the 2nd 1tb after but no mention of whether the games were scanned & if they were scanned then they will launch from the usb port you had it on

So all games were scanned fine from both drives and added to the games list. It's just that when I go to play the game off the 2nd drive I get the error message. If I play same copy of the game off the 1st drive it loads up and I can play it. Does it matter that the 2nd drive is USB 3.0? I would think if this was the case, the xbox would not pick up the drive at all. I am doing some backups and am going to do a few more tests to see if I can get this to work.

Thanks,

-M

I tested to see if it mattered where I placed the both drives. This is what I found: When I put the original drive in at the top port, it gets assigned to USB0 which is what it was assigned originally and the other gets USB1. Aurora starts fine reads all the content on both drives; but USB1 drive still does not start the game and I get that error.

When I switch the drive and put it in the bottom it gets assigned to USB1 and then the 2nd gets assigned to USB0. It does not start the dashboard and I get the error "The game couldn't start..." So it looks like it does matter what drive you plug it into; which is how it was when I used FreeStyle back in the day. I just remember having to put code in the launch.ini file to fix it, but now it seems that the launch.ini is no longer configured that way.

I installed FreeStyle and it only sees the one drive USB0 and will not allow me to add anything. They are all grayed out. I am not really interested in setting it up, I was just testing but that did not seem to work. Plus it has a lot of missing content. I am wondering if there is a plugin for this?

-M

[felida 1653]

Ok so i just helped a friend of mine out with this exact problem.. you have to first install one hdd in the top back usb port, it should read usb0.. then the other hdd in the front usb port.. try this and see if it helps

Edit: this was the fix for a slim trinity.. but might as well work for you on yours..

[misterymoi 2]

Ok so i just helped a friend of mine out with this exact problem.. you have to first install one hdd in the top back usb port, it should read usb0.. then the other hdd in the front usb port.. try this and see if it helps

Edit: this was the fix for a slim trinity.. but might as well work for you on yours..

Felida, I tried this but it did not work. 

 

I figured out what was wrong.  It was totally an error on my part and nothing to do with Dashlaunch / Aurora / launch.ini. ( I love it).

 

In my testing I had noticed that no xex would launch from the drive even although I could see the content and it picked up the drive on the xbox and in Aurora.  I remember reading somewhere that the phat 360 could not use a USB 3.0 drive.  I had converted the usb 2.0 into a 3.0 drive (removing from wd  case).  So I  put the hard drive back on a usb 2.0 adapter and it turns out that the xbox 360 did not correctly format the drive the first time when it was on 3.0 usb.  This time the hard drive showed up as unformatted in xbox.  I formatted it successfully from the xbox 360 system dash folder.  Then I tested it out with 2 games and they launched fine.

 

To test it out, I switched the now working drive back to the usb 3.0 adapter and xbox no longer saw the drive.  I switched it back to usb 2.0 and it works.  So I am assuming that you can't use a usb 3.0 drive on the phat xbox. Or at least not on mine.

Thanks all for your suggestions, they helped me to solve the issue.

-M

[scorpNZ 207]

It's just the drive housing by what you say as i use USB3.0 expansions on mine ,a falcon x 1 & 2 jaspers with no issue both 3.5 & 2.5".However it does come up regularly that usb 3 won't work in other posts

[Swizzy 2083]

Felida, I tried this but it did not work.

I figured out what was wrong. It was totally an error on my part and nothing to do with Dashlaunch / Aurora / launch.ini. ( I love it).

In my testing I had noticed that no xex would launch from the drive even although I could see the content and it picked up the drive on the xbox and in Aurora. I remember reading somewhere that the phat 360 could not use a USB 3.0 drive. I had converted the usb 2.0 into a 3.0 drive (removing from wd case). So I put the hard drive back on a usb 2.0 adapter and it turns out that the xbox 360 did not correctly format the drive the first time when it was on 3.0 usb. This time the hard drive showed up as unformatted in xbox. I formatted it successfully from the xbox 360 system dash folder. Then I tested it out with 2 games and they launched fine.

To test it out, I switched the now working drive back to the usb 3.0 adapter and xbox no longer saw the drive. I switched it back to usb 2.0 and it works. So I am assuming that you can't use a usb 3.0 drive on the phat xbox. Or at least not on mine.

Thanks all for your suggestions, they helped me to solve the issue.

-M

Since you formatted it with the 360 you likely created what is known as "USBMU" which are tied to the serial of the disk (enclosure if that has one) by changing the enclosure you break it...

Sent from my SM-G903F

[misterymoi 2]

Since you formatted it with the 360 you likely created what is known as "USBMU" which are tied to the serial of the disk (enclosure if that has one) by changing the enclosure you break it...

Sent from my SM-G903F

That makes sense since I swapped it out of the original western digital enclosure into another one.  Good to know thanks.

-M