A while back I screwed up the boot loader to my XBox (gen 1) and was planning on fixing it. There it sat and sat in my Dad's house until one day he calls me up and tells me he reformatted the drive as he saw no use in keeping the old thing around. I guess he wanted to recycle some of the parts. So now I have a brain dead XBox. All I can remember from softmodding it is you'd need the original HDD key (which now I can't get) I was wondering if there might be some hope for me still. Either that or I'll just end up buying a used one from my local thrift shop (seriously, those things come and go like crazy) but what fun is that?
What I would do is see if I could find a Xecuter 3 Mod Chip, (a little soldering would be required) and you can just put any hard drive in it that you want.
So I guess there is no chance of unformatting that drive ? Hiren's boot DVD 15.2 restored has several utilities capable of accomplishing just that.