it could be your sata cable. when an sata drive is unplugged from the 360, it reboots.

uh.. why the hell use the XP CD for a simple partitioning? you can do that in computer/drive managment directly.

both burners and media are optimized for higher speed burns. if you burn "too" slow, you end up with a $#!tty burn, to the point of being unreadable in the worst case.
as a basic rule you could say not to burn slower than half the maximum rating of a disk.

no.

no.

the burner most likely forces 4x. no recent burner supports slower speeds anymore, and it's good that way. burning 16x media at 2x results in a $#!tty burn.

by deciding to use 120 instead of 80.

1) this is NOT a technical research topic.
2) it tells you clearly what the issue is. FAT 32 only supports files of 4 GB max, so there is no way to dump a 7 GB file on there.
format the drive to NTFS.

the drive has nothing to do with that.

it burns one efuse every time the console firmware is updated. the entire purpose of the efuses is to be burnt, it merely is a tool for MS to prevent downgrading. there are no negative side effects, especially not if you aren't downgrading in the first place.
if all of them are burnt, nothing will happen either. I seriously doubt MS would make the firmware check beyond the available amount of efuses.

Send it to MS. You will be getting a RLOD soon.

cause it doesn't have the required security sectors etc used on retail HDDs.

wtf? where did you get that notion? why in the world would it stop the console from working?

20 and 120. there's also 80 for some debug kits, but not usable for retail.

insert whatever disk you started an update from before.

if the flash is bad, the console won't turn on at all.
A822 is the basic "bad flash" response. follow my bad flash fix tutorial and it will work.

since the console can't boot unsigned data from HDD, you have no option other than loading the game every time.

I am saying you shouldn't remove it in the first place, it makes no sense at all to do that unless you are downgrading.

swapping drives and what is needed has been discussed in detail countless times already.