So the hard drive crashed on our 360 last night. I probably shouldn’t have pushed it when I began to have problems saving the Fallout New Vegas, but with a game that buggy, I figured it was some bug I was encountering rather than a hard drive issue. I even tried switching games and was able to save without difficulty, so I tried to figure out what was going on with FNV, when the hard drive officially quit. The system now doesn’t even recognize the thing as formatted.
So we’ve accepted the fact that we’re going to need a new hard drive. (And I think we’re out of warranty.)
But is there any chance that we can recover the save games somehow (in a somewhat economical manner)? Considering I’m near the endgame of FNV (and the gf isn’t too far behind), and we also have all our Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 save states on that thing, it’s going to suck royally to have lost all that.
Find your local computer geek and offer him a case of beer to look at it. If I understand it correctly, the 360 uses a standard FAT/vFAT filesystem, so it’s at least plausible for a reasonably savvy sysadmin type to try to recover some stuff from it.
Even if that’s true, how do you get everything back onto the new system?
What I’d first try is getting a Xbox 360 memory card thing, putting the hard drive in the freezer overnight, then quickly jam it back into the Xbox and see if it will load. If it does, you have 20 or so minutes to copy your stuff to the memory card before it dies again (forever.) Oh, and totally put the HDD into plastic bag before you freeze it so moisture doesn’t bugger it.
I’m curious. Where does this “freezer” technique come from, and what’s the logic? Has anyone ever had it work? I can’t even understand WHY it would work. Hard drives don’t fail due to heat. o.o
It isn’t heat. Since the drive is so cold, it contracts a little which is supposed to keep the drive head from screwing up. It totally works, sometimes.
And if the drive isn’t spinning up, if you manually spin the whole drive and then quickly connect it, you can like jump start it into spinning. It’s pretty much the most badass IT fix ever.
Actually, apparently the contraction is supposed to allow the platters to spin up if the bearings are preventing that. That makes a lot more sense since you wouldn’t be hearing the clicking if the drive head was the issue since it’d be stuck. I guess I should Google these half-remembered tricks before trying to explain them. So if the drive isn’t spinning up, freezing it may help.
You could check the local computer repair places near you. A lot of them do data recovery for PCs, and they might know how to do the same for an XBox. Considering how many consoles are out there, there’s got to be a bit of a market for this sort of thing. At the very least, they can probably point you to someone who does know how to deal with this sort of thing.
Are you sure you’re out of warranty? I dont know how old your Xbox is, but a few years ago Microsoft extended the warranty on several 360 models to three years. I mention because I’ve known people whose packaging indicated a 90-day limited warranty, but who were actually able to get their 360s refurbished under the 3 year warranty.
It’s a standard drive. Pretty sure you can just plug the new XBox drive into your computer and move the data back out onto it. At least, I’m assured that’s the case from a buddy of mine whose expertise I have no reason to doubt (I’m just not asserting personal knowledge here).
Yeah, the Xbox 360 drive is way more open than I thought it was. I guess I just assumed it was as locked down as the original Xbox drive. Suppose that isn’t necessary since it isn’t booting off of it.
Or if I get the stuff off of it I need and they give me the broken one back.
But if it’s something as easy as getting the transfer kit for the drive and/or hiring someone with the knowledge of disk recovery, I’ll try that first.
At least FAT32 is much easier to recover data from than NTFS.
Thankfully, Microsoft saw the light there. Now all I need is for the Wii to accept a standard USB hard drive as legit storage for Rock Band tracks and I’ll be happy again.
Not to hijack the thread, but I have a spare usb drive large enough and I would have to buy a SDHC card. =P I’m vaguely morally opposed to computerized systems not accepting standard hardware, and it doesn’t get more standard than a USB2 vfat hard drive.
Nope, it’s a proprietary format*. You need special software like xplorer360 to get to the files. This is after you’ve either acquired a transfer cable to attach the drive to your PC via USB or removed it from the casing to attach it to a SATA port.
That said, if the drive’s so broken that the 360 doesn’t even recognize it, it probably won’t work connected to the PC either.
*-you can use a FAT32 formatted USB drive with a 360, but it’s treated like a 16GB (or smaller) memory card, and the files are written to the drive in a way that still aren’t anything you can readily access without another special program.