Xbox 360 File System Decoded

slurpster writes "The register reports that Pi group has decoded the file system used in the Xbox 360. They write "Once you get past the protections and down to the raw bits on the disc, its just the standard xboxdvdfs, however the offset and layer breakpoint are different.""

Comments

Important to Note

[MeanderingMind]

The article notes that this in an of itself is only a step in the long march towards all those crazy things people have done with the original Xbox.

An important step, but only a step.

Don't get too excited, it will be a few months yet before any underworld homebrew applications are running.

Re:Took that long?

[Elixon]

There will be always more clever people out there then those employed in various corporations...

The motivation is the key. Salary is a motivation but the fun is bigger motivation. :-)

The word "unbreakable" should not be used anymore. (Only liars from marketing departments use it :-)

Re:how?

[SigILL]

I've always wondered how you actually go about understanding a file system with absolutely no documentation.

Well, you know the contents of the files as well as their names, right? So you can use a simple text search to figure out where on the disk the contents are placed. Then you look for structures on the disk that appear to point to these contents.

You can for example figure out the size of a directory entry by looking for the amount of characters between successive file names. After that, things like file size and other metadata can usually be readily detected.

There's admittedly some guesswork involved. That's why official documentation is always preferrable to something that's reverse engineered.