Seeing as I cant connect straight through to my old PC will this USB to SATA adaptor do the trick? Anyone used these in the past, are they reliable or would you not recommend....
I would go with the first one (from own experience it worked). I mean the board I had did have Sata on it, but the VIA chipset was not the right one to let the xbox 360 be seen during the bootup. So I bought a Sata PCI card. It should work. The pci card that I have is VT6421A, by the looks of it so is the one on that ebay link you posted.
ye done some thorough googling to find the right one lol, but the thing is I wont be able to use the PCI card in my PC, so Im wondering will this USB adaptor power the PCI card efficiently?
some tried it and they stated it did not work when they went to dump the hack firmware onto the xbox.
If your pci slots are full, why not take a card out of it. I mean when you go through the firmware hack steps you do not need anything else other than the pc (with no hard drives attached), a keyboard, and a monitor.
I mean regardless of the PCI it should work. I mean the only different PCI out there from my knowledge are PCI, PCI 16x and PCI 1x. The PCI card on that ebay link is a standard PCI card, it should work. If you would like a second opinion on this (about if this PCI card will work on your PC not the Xbox) post it here http://www.hardforum.com/ . They should be able to give you a 100% reassurance.