Xbox Original + 250GB Slim Won't won't work.

There was no reply to this thread so I ended up calling 18004MYXBOX. After around 2 hours on the phone just to play some Halo CE I was basically told I was out of luck. The conclusion they came to was that my hard drive, although the bundled microsoft distributed one, is missing a ROM chip that enables the playback of originals. Don't want to pay to ship hard drive off and wait forever for a new one, so fail on microsoft. I will just go without.

support is wrong there is no ROM chip in the hard drive, what it has is a partition that contains the emulator software for the old xbox games.  if your system is still under warranty, back up your saves and profile to a USB flash drive an\d send out the drive as it probably is defective if it is not allowing you to play the old games on it.

you are not supposed to hook up a 360 hard drive to the PC, it is against the TOS (terms of service), and I am pretty sure even talking about 'self repair' on the forum is not allowed.

Interesting, wonder why it's against TOS...well it doesn't matter anyway as I bought another one and gave my old one to my brother who just bought a second slim without a hard drive. It works on his and mine still doesn't with a brand new drive. I don't know what is going on with this thing, I have tried deleting and reinstalling the update repeatedly and still no go. I want to just buy them from the Games on demand thing, but I am almost positive those won't work either and I seriously doubt Microsoft would give me a refund when it didn't.

Hey mate, did you by chance use a transfer cable on this HDD when you purchased the Xbox 360 S? If so, was it an official, first-party Microsoft cable?

No didn't use transfer cable, I have one I got from Microsoft for free ages ago when the elites first came out, but I just started fresh on the slim and anytime there was a save I wanted to use I just put it on a memory stick and transferred it over. I just went through my download history and re-downloaded everything when I did my license transfer for my DLC and other stuff. Should I try to use the transfer cable from my old xbox?

No, I don't know that it would resolve the issue. I ask because, if using a third-party cable, the new 250 GB will be formatted as a flash device, which would prevent you from playing Xbox Original games. One thing you may want to try is having a friend with some Xbox Original games (downloaded from Games on Demand) recover their account to your console, at which point they can re-download the games on your console, and then test the games using their account.

Yeah, that's what I was thinking too, but no one I know has them. I would download Halo CE myself, but I may as well save the money for the remake coming up.