Partition layouts are documented in the link below. The partition layout is different for both retail and development kits. The original Xbox uses static partition offsets and lengths. Once you have navigated your way to the desired partition, the next sections will be working on offsets relative to that partition into the FATX file system.

There are other partitions that use the FATX file system but these usually have nothing other than system or cached data. The most interesting partition in my opinion is Partition1, which contains game and user data. You can use this documentation to navigate your way to a particular partition. We will only be focusing on the partitions that do contain FATX file systems as it is these that contain game and user data. A harddrive will contain multiple partitions, some of which contain FATX file systems, and others that don’t. It supports both 16 and 32 bit file allocation tables, which will depend on the size of the partition. The original Xbox and the Xbox 360 uses a file system named FATX, which is a variant of the FAT file system, created specifically for these two game consoles. There are currently two open source repositories on my GitHub for fatx-tools. I will cover the FATX file system and methods for data recovery. My goal is try and give users a greater understanding into how these tools work so that they may possibly be improved upon or just as an aid for doing manual data recovery.

This is a write up for the data recovery tools I created for the Xbox and the Xbox 360.

Fatx Format Tool