Xbox Dashboard Network settings and the Disk Config Area

Recently I've been looking into reading the network settings that the 
Xbox Dashboard and Live use from within Linux. Initially I thought that 
these would lie in the EEPROM, as indicated in:

http://www.xbox-linux.org/wiki/Xbox_Serial_EEPROM

According to that article the Live network settings are stored in the 
EEPROM at 0xA8 - 0xB7. However for me these addresses are blank and 
changing the Xbox's network settings doesn't alter the contents of the 
EEPROM. After more research I found out that the settings seem to be 
stored in the Disk Config Area i.e. in the first 512k of the Xbox hard 
disk. This is what I observed:

Offset           Size   Description
0x104c - 0x104d  2      Settings
0x104e - 0x1053  6      MAC Address
0x1054 - 0x1057  4      IP Address
0x1058 - 0x105b  4      Subnet Mask
0x105c - 0x105f  4      Default Gateway
0x1060 - 0x1063  4      Primary DNS
0x1064 - 0x1067  4      Secondary DNS
0x1068 - 0x108f  40     Hostname
0x1090 - 0x10cf  64     PPPOE Username
0x10d0 - 0x110f  64     PPPOE Password
0x1100 - 0x1137  40     Padding?
0x1138 - 0x115f  40     PPPOE Service Name

Whether DHCP is enabled, etc can be extracted from 0x104c - 0x104d 
(Settings)

if (Settings & 0x01) then Custom MAC Address
if (Settings & 0x02) then PPPOE Enabled
if (Settings & 0x04) then Manual IP Settings
if (Settings & 0x08) then Manual DNS Settings

I've also put together a small program which reads these settings from 
the Hard Disk and displays them on stdout. If anyone is interested I'll 
happily provide source for this.

Anyway what I'm interested in is why these settings were previously 
thought to lie in the EEPROM. I came to my findings using a v1.1 Xbox 
and the 4920 dashboard to change the Xbox's network settings. I also 
tried using the latest Xbox dashboard (5960) and again they were stored 
in the disk config area. Does anyone know under what circumstances (if 
any) the network settings would be stored in the EEPROM? Has anyone done 
much research into the layout of the disk config area?

Richard


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