yeah its not that simple my guy, the hard drive is locked and the only way to unlock it is with the key stored in the xbox's eeprom
and even if you went through the trouble of hotswapping and adapters and all that nonsense, you'd still need to use something like xplorer 360 to even see what the hell is on there
it makes far more sense for the OP to go ahead and softmod the console with rocky5's tool, since then he can just use ftp to pull shit off and then they can also upgrade the hard drive, dump games to the drive, and all the other fun stuff that goes along with it
