Help w/ orig Xbox - formatted drive

In the process of turning an old Xbox into a media player I accidentally wiped the hard drive and reformatted it.
None of the data recovery programs will work as they don't understand the fatx file system.
Any clues on how to recover this? Can I make a backup from another Xbox and transfer the files to this one?
I've googled this pretty extensively but everything I've found seems to be about mods and different dashboards and such and that's not what I was trying to do.

 

answered my own question