Question about an Xbox hard drive

[Vishera]

So I don't know how much you guys know about consoles and their hardware, but I'm wondering if any of you know of a way to repair a failing Xbox 360 drive? Would a normal computer hard drive repair program work? Would PC cloning software work to get the data off of it?

 

[Alaric]

I think it's a regular computer HDD. The ones I've seen were, anyway.

 

[Vishera]

I think it's a regular computer HDD. The ones I've seen were, anyway.

Figured out that the connector is standard SATA so I'm gonna see if Windows 10 recognizes it when I get my computer up and running. Bought this as a gift for my little brother's birthday and I had to buy used, on account of not being able to find a new 360, and now that it's messing up I feel bad. He's sunk $400 or more into his DLCs that he's bought over the past 6 years and if I can't find a way to get the data off this hard drive it's all gonna go down the drain :/

 

[Alaric]

To the best of my knowledge the HDD can be cloned.

 

[Vishera]

I'll give it a shot then. Thanks Alaric

 

[Alaric]

No problem.

 

[trents]

In what way is the drive failing? Bearings going out? Bad data clusters?

The Xbox 360 has a proprietary OS and I don't think a Windows computer will recognize the drive. Furthermore, a lot of cloning software will not be able to clone a drive that is not healthy, even when both drives are formatted with the same file system. file system compatibility isn't an issue.

 

[knoober]

https://askubuntu.com/questions/581716/cloning-xbox360-with-dd

I thought there might be a way to accomplish this with Linux but haven't looked into it to far. The above link has a little that is interesting but will need further research. But without a drive to test on there isnt any point for me to loon further, perhaps fertile grounds for the OP though

 

[deathman20]

Xbox 360 uses a standard HDD, but it has custom partitions which isn't readable at least by native OS's.

Really the only method I know of transferring stuff from off the drives is to copy all the data from the drive to another drive when its hooked up to the system because of the copy protection built into it.
https://www.tweaking4all.com/software/games/xbox-360-duplicate-xbox-360-content/

I did find from a quick look, its almost 4 years old now but, HDclone 4.2 seems to be able to close the full drive from drive all contents. Backup can take a long time so hopefully the drive doesn't die between then (guy mentioned 9hours to transfer from 1TB drive to another 1TB drive with ~500GB of data). Now if you go to a larger drive from there, people say that you can use partitioning software (like partition magic) to increase the partition size and it should be good to go.
http://team-xecuter.com/forums/threads/96210-Cloning-250gb-slim-HDD-to-500gb-HDD

 

[trents]

But if it uses custom partitions will PM be able to work with those?

 

[deathman20]

Supposedly it does from what others are saying.

 

[Alaric]

Found this on the 'egg today. https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822178882&ignorebbr=1 Don't know if it works with the 360, though.

 

[rescuetoaster]

Found this on the 'egg today. https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822178882&ignorebbr=1 Don't know if it works with the 360, though.

The 360 will recognize up to 32 gigs of external storage for gaming purposes - it will see larger media drives if formatted to fat32.
The 360 can take custom harddrives. When I looked into doing this, the WD scorpio series seemed to be a safe choice.
Here is a guy who walks through the process.

 

[benbaked]

The 360 will recognize up to 32 gigs of external storage for gaming purposes - it will see larger media drives if formatted to fat32.
The 360 can take custom harddrives. When I looked into doing this, the WD scorpio series seemed to be a safe choice.
Here is a guy who walks through the process.

Years ago I upgraded my 360's hard drive to a 320gb WD Scorpio Blue that I pulled out of a dead laptop, using HDDHackr. It worked great, has never given me troubles in probably the five years it's been since I did the drive upgrade.

 

[josweet]

Connect the new HDD to the console, get him to sigh back into his Xbox live account & all his DLC's will be there for him to download again.
Connecting the Drive to your PC wont just work due to the file system not being supported within windows (fatX) To Copy the content , youll need to download an application that allows you to read the Fatx format. I forget the name of it, but its free