Xbox Hard Drive Issue

Marek

I recently booted up my Xbox, and it prompted me for a Xbox Live update. That happens often enough, so I click ok. However, it says there is not enough room in my storage drive for the update. I cancel and go over to storage, and all of a sudden, it says my 120gb drive is un-formatted, and the only available option is to format it. Now, I haven't clicked format yet, b/c obviously that would wipe the drive.

My Hard Drive is toast, isn't it? I haven't been able to talk to Xbox Support yet, but I wanted to see if anyone else has had a hard drive go dead on them... This is gonna suck, if so.

iRevert

Stupid question of the day
Have you removed the HD and then plugged it back in and tried booting up the xbox again?

Marek

iRevert wrote: »

Stupid question of the day
Have you removed the HD and then plugged it back in and tried booting up the xbox again?

Yes, I have. Not a stupid question, because that is the first thing I did.

Marek

Update: I have been speaking with support. They think the issue is either the Hard Drive itself is corrupted, meaning all data (+3 years) is lost. Alternatively, my console has a hardware issue, but to test this I would have to take my Hard Drive to another console (the old thick one, not the new slims) and see if the other console can recognize and retrieve the data.

Great Scott

I don't own an Xbox, but this post: http://www.xbox-scene.com/articles/pc-hdd.php seems to indicate that you can mount it from a PC. Once you have it connected to a PC (and seen properly), there are any number of data-recovery and partition-recovery programs that might work.

I've used R-Studio NTFS to great effect (I'm assuming that Xbox drives use a similar file-system). Even if you can't recover it a partition-restore program might let you see it again in an Xbox.