I have a lot of love for the OG Xbox, and with an exploding homebrew scene there is tons of stuff to do here!
Your Xbox has had its clock capacitor removed to prevent long term damage to the board. Note, this means the Xbox will not save the system time if it is unplugged. It has also been hard modded, either with what is called a TSOP flash, which flashes a new “hacked” BIOS directly onto the onboard TSOP flash memory, or via an Aladdin modchip on 1.6 board revisions. These will give the same end result, but note that the aladdin chips currently in production are not able to be reflashed. If you want to change your BIOS at any time and you have a 1.6 revision board, you will need a different modchip (the header is already in place, so this should in theory be a drop in install). If all you want to do is play backup games, this will not be necessary. Flashing your BIOS has potential to brick your system and I suggest you stay away from it without thorough research on the topic.
The system contains a 500gb hard drive. All system data, saves, games, etc, will be stored on the hard drive. One of the critical flaws of the stock original Xbox is its reliance on a 20 year old hard drive. If the system is not modded prior to its failure, the system will not boot, and replacing it without a mod will not work as the drive is married to the motherboard. If you for some reason want to upgrade your hard drive, thanks to the hard mod, you are able to put any drive in and have it up and running provided you place the proper files on the hard drive. I wouldn't recommend doing this without thorough research.
The hard drive is connected to the board with a high quality SATA to IDE adapter, which allows the system to take full advantage of the increased read/write speeds offered by the faster drives and connectors. This includes the system booting up faster than a stock system as well as loading games, both the initial load as well as level loading.
<aside> <img src="/icons/info-alternate_green.svg" alt="/icons/info-alternate_green.svg" width="40px" /> Your Xbox’s disk drive may or may not work. All games are able to load via the onboard hard drive, not only with 100% compatibility, but decreased load time! It is your console, so feel free to use the disc drive, but note that THESE ARE NOT REPLACEABLE. The only way to get a new disk drive is from a donor console, unfortunately. As such I highly recommend you not use the disc drive, and save the laser for events where you may need it (such as running some utility disks that run better from the disk drive).
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Your system is flashed with an EvoX BIOS. There are other BIOS’ available to use but this is the most simple in terms of just booting a modded system to play games.
EvoX also includes an IGR(In game reset) feature. This will boot back to the dashboard without requiring you to get up and reboot the console. The combo is L,R,Back,Black. Please see my note in the Technical Details regarding this combo.
Your Xbox will then load a custom dashboard, called UnleashX. It will look similar to this:
Your menu options will be self explanatory.
You are able to replace UnleashX with another Dashboard, if you’d prefer. There are many out there, but XBMC4Gamers is currently well maintained and has some nice features, such as a DLC downloader for your games. I like UnleashX as it captures that original dashboard “feel” for me.
Games should be placed within the “Games” folder of the hard drive. To access the hard drive, the best method is to connect the Xbox to your network and FTP to the system using a tool such as **FileZilla. Simply enter the IP address displayed on the home screen, and enter the username and password ‘xbox’. Then navigate to F:\Games and place your game folder there.**
An example of what your Xbox game directory should look like. The left is your local PC, the right is your Xbox. Screenshot taken from FileZilla, but any FTP client will do the job.