360 external hdd won't show on my pc?

[wuzizname 0]

Really nutty situation with an external I'm running that has me at my wits end. I formatted FAT32, it's a 1TB sata drive (3.5") in a compliant USB2.0 external case. Formatted it on PC using the FAT32 format tool.

After formatting it with the tool it showed up in windows no problem. Made some folders, ripped some games with Xbox Backup Creator no problem-o.

Went back to the 360. Installed Dashlaunch 3, played some metal gear rising and all was well with the world.

This morning, I brought the external upstairs and hooked it back up to the PC.. and it's not showing up anymore, Windows seems to want nothing to do with it anymore. Seems as soon as I hook it up to the 360 I lose my ability to read it on the PC. Here's what's going on:

- Volume recognized by USB and windows pops up and shows new hardware found. Volume shows in USB "safely remove hardware"

-Volume shows in windows disc manager, as a 1TB "unallocated" volume

- Windows will not auto assign a drive letter to it anymore, disc manager only offers to partition or format it, like it's a new unformatted drive.

- If I force a drive letter onto it, through DISKPART or similar cmd line shinanigans, it will show in explorer but will nag me to "insert disc". Shows as 1TB unformatted.

-360Xplorer also will not recognize it.

- Freestyle dash and XEXMenu have no problem reading it.

This is the strangest and most frustrating thing, wtf external hard drive! :mad2:

Any ideas on why window won't let me rip and dump games on this drive? Why the filesystem and content won't show?

Xbox is the 4gb internal mu model.

PS.. also tried on 3 different machines, 2 are XP the 3rd is win7.

[The Cowboy 28]

try back of pc which has better powersuplly support.

[wuzizname 0]

try back of pc which has better powersuplly support.

Thanks for tip, but external has its own dedicated power supply. Its also hooked to a dedicated PCI to USB 2 card as the only device... And I even tried the SATA out to connector on mobo in PC...same results as posted in 1st post.. Like its a blank drive-

[wuzizname 0]

I added a 36gb xbox system save to see if it would make any difference... and still no luck.

 

I've also tried another USB 2.0 external case and tried the other case on a Windows XP and a Windows 7 machine.

 

Device Manager shows the volume, under "disk drives" in hardware manager, and I can click on "populate" in the properties menu, it show:

 

Disk: Disk 6

Type: basic

Status: Online

Partition: Master boot record (MBR)

Capacity: 953867 MB

Unallocated: 953867 MB (wrong!)

Reserved space: 0 MB

 

Shows the same in Computer Manager utility as device 6, online. Just can't mount it to a drive letter or open the bloody thing.

 

I've unistalled the driver, turned the drive off and back on- windows recognizes it and installs it but the results are the same.

 

I've also completely unistalled ALL of my USB devices, done a fresh restart with the drive plugged in... nope!

 

The crazy thing is, I formatted this drive as FAT32 and copied over about 16gb of data onto this drive by THIS computer that no longer sees it!

 

Something happened, moving the drive to the xbox360 has done something to it and now I can't open this external on Windows explorer anymore.. I suspect shenigans by M$?

 

Any other ideas?

[Prayer 49]

Try deleting it's primary partition through Windows. If that doesn't help you could try Gparted and format your hard disk with it.

[wuzizname 0]

Thanks prayer. Trying to avoid formatting it again because it has significant amount of data on it, and have reformatted already and the situation repeats...

[Prayer 49]

It's the only good thing I could think of. Keep us updated.