Bought a used xbox 360 HD, wont let me format it

Varinn

The title isn't 100% true, but effectively I bought a 120GB hard drive off craigslist to replace my stock 20GB version. It plugs in and works fantastically but it was loaded up with the other guys games and whatnot so I went and did a format through the XBOX console. It claims to have deleted everything, but it won't let me install anything on the drive myself if he had previously installed the same game. When looking at the list of items on the storage screen I get a huge list of all his stuff with yellow exclamation points beside them. They list their original file size but the console is registering the drive as empty!

In other words, if he had previously installed a game, I can no longer install that same one myself as it says it's already there... but it isn't.

skeldare

Have you tried to actually format the drive?

http://support.xbox.com/en-us/xbox-360/accessories/storage

Important When you format a storage device, all of the information saved on that device is erased and cannot be recovered. Make sure that you either do not want the information stored on that device or have backed up the information to another device before you continue.

To format a storage device

1. Press the Guide button on your controller, go to Settings, and select System Settings.

2. Select Storage or Memory.

3. Select the storage device that you want to rename, and then press Y on your controller.

4. Select Format. You will see the following message:
This will delete all content on this device. Do you wish to continue?

5. Select Yes to format the storage device.

6. If you are asked to enter your console serial number, do so, and then select Done. This step helps to guard against accidental formatting.

The console serial number is located on the back of the console and behind the oval door on the front of the console.

Varinn

I had, and thankfully after borrowing a cable from a friend (where I had been using a flash drive before) I was able to plug it into my computer and reformat it. Sadly I did not realize that when transfering files it actually TRANSFERS them instead of copying, so by transfering to the USB, and then to the Hard Drive before I did the computer based wipe... Well I lost every single save game I had, so it looks like I'll be re-playing Skyrim, Mass Effect 1,2, and 3 and many others from the start! I never thought to double check that the files still existed on the flash drive or my original hard drive before unplugging the new one from the xbox and wiping it with my computer. It's not the end of the world, I'm not a massive gamer but it's a little disappointing to know that all of my time spend on some favorite games was lost because of a touch of carelessness on my part. OH WELL

EDIT: I've also smartened up and setup the cloud storage, though I cant ever see this happening to me again.