USB HDD + 360 = Disappointment

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fuerstma

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So I bought a new laptop, and decided to throw the hard drive from my old desktop into a USB case and attach it to my 360. Hey, more storage to handle all those downloads, the better right? Plus at $15 for the USB case, I figured why not?

The first hurdle is that the 360 only recognizes FAT32, not NTFS. I knew that going into the situation though. After getting it in the case, I repartitioned the drive and did some googling for a utility to let me format over 32 GB FAT32. 2000 and XP can format hard drives as FAT32, but only up to 32 GB. Silly Microsoft. The good news is the free 3rd party util I downloaded formatted it in about 2 seconds. Sweet.

I threw a ton of video files onto the drive for testing purposes.

Got home (of course I was doing this prep work at work, silly) and plugged the USB HDD into the 360.

Man, what a disappointment.

You pretty much, can't do anything with it.

You can go into the "Pictures" and "Music" portion of the Media blade, and play music and show pictures on the drive. You CANNOT play video files from the external drive. You CANNOT move downloaded demos and trailers from your built in hard drive to the external drive. You CANNOT backup your gamer profile and details from the internal hard drive to the external drive. What a waste! That's pretty seriously useless.
 
[quote name='fuerstma']So I bought a new laptop, and decided to throw the hard drive from my old desktop into a USB case and attach it to my 360. Hey, more storage to handle all those downloads, the better right? Plus at $15 for the USB case, I figured why not?

The first hurdle is that the 360 only recognizes FAT32, not NTFS. I knew that going into the situation though. After getting it in the case, I repartitioned the drive and did some googling for a utility to let me format over 32 GB FAT32. 2000 and XP can format hard drives as FAT32, but only up to 32 GB. Silly Microsoft. The good news is the free 3rd party util I downloaded formatted it in about 2 seconds. Sweet.

I threw a ton of video files onto the drive for testing purposes.

Got home (of course I was doing this prep work at work, silly) and plugged the USB HDD into the 360.

Man, what a disappointment.

You pretty much, can't do anything with it.

You can go into the "Pictures" and "Music" portion of the Media blade, and play music and show pictures on the drive. You CANNOT play video files from the external drive. You CANNOT move downloaded demos and trailers from your built in hard drive to the external drive. You CANNOT backup your gamer profile and details from the internal hard drive to the external drive. What a waste! That's pretty seriously useless.[/QUOTE]

Welcome to Nov. 21, 2005. ;)

External drives can only store music or pics. That's it. Sorry you had to learn the hard way.
 
Maybe you should have researched what you could do with a USB drive and the X360 before you went through the trouble of finding out what was already known?

I'm sorry that you went through all that, but 15 minutes on the internet would have saved you the disappointment.
 
[quote name='Corvin']Welcome to Nov. 21, 2005. ;)

External drives can only store music or pics. That's it. Sorry you had to learn the hard way.[/QUOTE]


yup. I was so pissed when I found out you needed Media center :lol:
 
15 minute of searching slam - totally appropriate.
However, it is so painfully illogical, I couldn't imagine why it wouldn't play video. Momma. Ridiculous! Thanks for the handcuffs Microsoft!
 
You really don't want to create partitions larger than 32GB in FAT32. It will work but all kinds of funky errors can creep in that aren't detected until a file becomes unusable and unrecoverable. There is a reason for the limit.
 
Isn't there an accessory that you can attach to the 360's HDD and transfer files to your PC that way. Kinda like a larger Action replay....I forget the name of the accessory. It has a blue light around it.
 
[quote name='doubledown']Isn't there an accessory that you can attach to the 360's HDD and transfer files to your PC that way. Kinda like a larger Action replay....I forget the name of the accessory. It has a blue light around it.[/quote]

Yeah, I can't remember the full name of it, but it's something like the "Thisfucker'sGoingTofuckUpMy360er" from Datel.
 
I had read somewhere that they are going to allow streaming video from regular XP machines sometime in the near future...but then again, I can't find a site to backup my claim......
 
[quote name='nyprimus4']They purposely did this to push the Media Center PC's.[/QUOTE]

Yeah,of course. Just like they make you play 360 games and not GameCube ones.
 
[quote name='powrslave007']I had read somewhere that they are going to allow streaming video from regular XP machines sometime in the near future...but then again, I can't find a site to backup my claim......[/quote]

On the Windows Media Player 11(beta) site is says that you can stream videos from your computer to your 360, but the functionality still hasn't been updated to allow it in the 360--maybe in the fall update.:bouncy:
 
The new Vista RC1 has built in media center. I own a regular PC (not a media center PC) and when you install Vista, it comes with Media Center installed. You simply have to follow the onscreen directions and bingo! I've been using it to stream video to my 360 for over 2 weeks now. Of course this requires a lil computer know how as I wouldn't recommend installing Vista over XP coz it's still buggy...but to stream content and watch vids on the 360 it works just fine for me.

If you are going to install Vista, make a new partition in your drive because it won't install in all computers. It refused to install in my laptop (which I tried without partitioning), so I tried both my desktops (partitioned those drives) and they installed flawlessly. Weird.
 
xbmc ftw.

I hate the 360 as a media hub, compared to the original and xbmc running on it.

Even the dvd playback is superior with a regular xbox to me.

To each his own.
 
Yeah, I need to mod my Xbox somtime. I'm waiting for the 500 gb drives to drop to about $75 before I do it, though. Then I can put all my games on it and never worry about the discs or drive again.
 
Just wondering; does anyone know any FREE utilities that can format a 40GB USB HDD into FAT32. I try Windows itself, but I pull up nothing.
 
Why the hell would I want to have my computer on? I want to run the video directly from the drive, how the hell hard is that?

And here's a hint, MS: let me fuckING FAST FORWARD MY MP3s.

Complete bullshit, I have no idea why they would do shit like this.
 
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