you can do this if you strapped for cash

http://www.pcworld.com/article/150970/upgrade_your_xbox_360s_hard_drive_on_the_cheap.html

you can try using this drive if you cant find the Western Digital scorpio one:

http://www.amazon.com/5400RPM-Buffer-Serial-2-5INCH-Retail/dp/B000G0HPAM/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1249943301&sr=8-1

Hey, that was quite a rant there.
You know, we're looking for an everyman to rant about petty, nonsensical irritants to replace our "Spotlight on the Middle East" segment.

Actually you wasted £19 because you could have just done the whole thing yourself.

1. Buy a Western Digital Scorpio BEVS 2.5inch HD for £30 delivered.

2. Unscrew the Xbox 360 HD and removed the old 20GB drive

3. Plug in the old to your PC and download a program called "Xplorer360"

...Ahhh bugger it, but there's plenty of detailed tutorials you can follow that will have you up and running in 20 mins tops if you follow the steps properly. Sounds like you just got ahead of yourself and didn't follow the procedure correctly. The transfer software is very buggy, but does work if you know what you're doing.

^

I get what you are saying and I did explore the whole do it yourself thing but one of the goals was to have a 20gb drive left over to use in the Arcade.

I strongly suspect what I have is the cage for a 120gb drive with a third party equivalent HDD installed which somebody in Asia is knocking out.

The harddrive installed was made by Fujitsu.

yeah, microsoft doesn't make it hard. They make it really easy. Your problem was that you got some knock off hard drive, has nothing to do with microsoft.

Sounds like they were selling non-MS 120gb HDD's in an old 20GB HDD enclosure.

I think I have the Mitigration CD that you need, But i'm not too sure since I might have thrown it due to me never needing it again.  Maybe I was under the impression that you can only use the CD once before they are useless.  But then again I have no idea why I would think that since I never saw anything saying that.  Ah, now i'm just confusing myself  

Chances are you did. Whenever you buy a 120gb HDD for the 360 you can get a free transfer kit. This includes buying the Elite iirc. Essentially you brought the problem on yourself by buying a shady drive. It sucks for you, but hard to blame Microsoft ya know? Well glad it all worked out for you in the end anyways. Still saved a few quid too.

Money in the bank indeed and I guess I was forced into my shadyness due to the fact I could not bring myself to spend nearly £100 smackers on a poxy laptop drive.

When I did my initial trawling it was not clear that the drives came with the migration kit, although since I did this I have found them on Amazon with the migration kit, but damned if I did not see that at the time I embarked on this little adventure.

The drive does seem legit but I agree it was probably a 20gb drive rebadged to a 120gb unit.

Oh and yes I am glad it worked out in the end. After all I still have an original unit with a typhoon class DVD drive so it will be cool to get some install to hard drive going on. Probably could do with a RROD in the hope I get one of the newer models my sons arcade is SOOOO quiet in comparison.