Well you could use any Hard drive and then use it on the xbox. But you would need to build an
eeprom reader to read the eeprom.bin off a chip on the xbox motherboard with a program called Ponyprog and then use
Liveinfo Beta 3 to check the serial number from the read and see if it matches the xbox serial number, and if they do you're all good to go
I have my own eeprom reader and fixed my xbox like that, and my xbox was dead for 2yrs and i brought it back to life hhaha now its a cool media center