Ive been researching the Xbox hotswap mod and today got round to trying to do it when i found my PC has SATA cables for the HDD. Now my question is does my PC have a primary IDE slot that i could hotswap to the Xbox? i need to keep a cd drive connected up though. I have a Dell Dimension 5150. Heres a pic of the mother board:
Yes it does. At present your 2 optical drives are running on one idechannel, you could disconnect both of them, plug your hard drive in as a master (on the end of the cable) then one optical drive as a slave (middle of the cable), job done. Looking at your system though, you would probably have to unscrew the hard drive and bring it closer to the optical drives because the cable won't reach to plug them both in.
Another thing, the ide socket at the bottom of the board, bottom of your picture, is that IDE2 (or IDE1 if yours starts from IDE0) or is it a floppy IDE (smaller)? If it is a normal IDE socket you could just use that instead and leave everything else as it is.
Ok, well you should be able to do one optical and the hard drive on the same idechannel as I described above, just make sure the jumper settings on the hard disk are so to master (and that it's on the end of the cable) and that the optical drives jumpers are set to slave (and that it's on the middle of the cable).
Another thing I just thought of, I assume that your hard drive doesn't have both ide and sata connections? At first I assumed it would have since mine do, you might need to get an IDE hard drive to do this then.
