Hard Drive Failure? Suggestions?

[ColFantastic]

Woe and despair upon my house and my Xbox!!

Tonight while playing Saints Row IV, my screen froze up during while loading a level. After 5 minutes or so, I powered down my system and restarted it. Immediately the system asked to install an update, which of course I agreed to. After a good 15 minutes, the update was installed and I went back to playing my game.

To my horror, my game save wasn't available. I immediately went to my storage options and the screen said my hard drive was unformatted! I got a hold of Xbox Tech Support and we went through several troubleshooting branches, none of course which worked. The only thing I still have to try is taking my hard drive to test in another Xbox. Naturally I've moved recently and none of my local friends have a 360. I'm going to try taking it to my local Gamestop and see if they can help a guy out. I'm waiting to attempt to reformat after I check with Gamestop.

The thing that sucks so hard is that IF this is unsalvageable, I will have lost 6-7 years of save data from my old and my current Xbox 360. The hard drive is only 18 months old but was a third party manufacturer which I got for a dirty deal.

My question to you fine folks is: To those who have had hard drive failures, did your hard drive become unformatted like this? Was their anyway to salvage any of the save data? Does this sound like a hard drive failure or (hopefully) just something with OS not reading it properly?

Thanks for any insight you folks can provide.

 

[ColFantastic]

Also, even though I'm getting an Xbox One I still want to keep my 360 around to keep in another room and keep busting through my back log. Can I use an external hard drive instead of purchasing another internal hard drive for game installs and downloads? Is there still a size limit on how big of an external drive I can use?

 

[62t]

You can use external drive but you can only access 32gb

 

[mitch079]

I suppose you could have any number of 32gb thumb drives with data on them but only two can be plugged in at the same time.

 

[ColFantastic]

So I've read some interwebs stuff and apparently I can swap the actual hard drive for another laptop hard drive. Might run to Best Buy and grab a 250 gb I saw for $40 and see what I can do. Has anyone else done this before? Anything I need to worry about?

 

[Kingrodedog]

I've thought about doing it but you have to get a hold of the 250GB hard drive image through "sources" and put it on there yourself, I always found it easier to buy a laptop HDD on ebay that this has already been done to. I've bought two of them and the first one I got was no good, I returned it and got another. I think that one may have crapped out again. I also have another one that I bought and it is doing fine, for now.

I think that they are comparable in price to the route that your looking at.

Also, if you can, I would start thinking about using the cloud for saved games. I have been lately and I like it, I can use my profile anywhere via download and my saves are always available and if I have another hard drive crash, I won't lose my hard earned data!

 

[randamin]

There are PC programs that can be used to recover data from a dying hard drive but I'm not sure how those would work with the X360 file system and since the failure was abrupt the damage may have been severe. One of these is known as kroll ontrack but the full version costs $80 while the demo will only allow to view the files although there are others which may be cheaper.