All of my originals are safely tucked away at my mothers house about 60 miles away. I am considering buying a 250gb hard drive, and i simply wish to know, can i install my backups to this drive, or will i need my originals to do so?

Hi,

Backups will install fine to your HDD, but you will still need them in your console to play unless you have a J-tag system which allows you to boot backups from your HDD.

Would you mind explaining what you mean?..the reason i wish to install to the hard drive is to reduce load time and to quiet the drive..Does the drive continue to spin loudly while I'm playing?

Why would the disk be required to be in the drive?
What about if I installed from the originals? Would they still be required to be in the drive? Is this a M$ thing, or a LT thing?

If you could play the game without the disc in, then you would be able to give the disc to one of your friends, and they could simply install it on their hard drives without buying their own discs. Rinse and repeat and piracy would be simple.

Once game installed to hard drive, no more loud noises!