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outofwork

Lost 2 TB external hard drive tonight

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I just lost my Seagate external hard drive tonight after installing about 20 new games.  I haven't touched the XBox 360 for at least five months and right in the midst of testing all of the new games the drive disappeared.  I took it back to the PC and the drive won't come ready.  You can hear a brief spinup, a  brief pause, and another attempt at spinning up.  It's an endless cycle and the drive appears to be toast.

That leads to my questions and my apologies for the questions which I couldn't find answers to in my searches here.  Fortunately I have a data backup of almost everything except for the new games I was installing tonight.

1) The drive that failed was 2 TBs.  I'd like to replace it with a 3 TB drive.  Will that size drive work?  

2) Is one large partition acceptable? Is it a primary partition, etc.?

3) Does the drive need to be formatted as a FAT32 drive?  What is the largest external drive the XBox 360 using FSD can use and utilize all the space on the drive?

4) Do I somehow need to let the XBox 360 format the external drive?  I don't think so but I wanted to ask.  I just can't remember how I set this up a few years ago. 

Apologies for the questions but I set this up years ago with the help of you folks here and I have been away from the basics for a long time.

 

Thanks,

outofwork

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1. It will probably work, but you can only use the first 2TB anyways...

2. It only reads the first partition

3. Yes, it needs to be FAT32 to work properly

4. Well, you could... but it's not required...

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I partitioned an available 3 TB Seagate to 2 TB and formatted it as FAT32 but the console can't see the external drive.  i did this because I didn't want to spend $100 on another 2 TB drive.  I am probably suffering from ACRS <BSEG> and I can't remember if I had to do anything special when I intially did this about three years ago to get the console to recognize the external drive.

ASSUMPTIONS (which obviously may not be valid)/Questions :

1) Even though the external drive is 3 TBs, I partitioned it to 2 TBs and formatted it as FAT32 so I'm thinking that the fact that it's 3 TBs is not the problem.  Could the unallocated space (1 TB) on the drive be causing the problem?

2) I believe that the sector size on the external drive is 512.  Could that be the problem?  Is the sector size critical?

3) I "assume" that the volume label of the external drive is not a critical issue.

4) The partition is Primary and Active.

Hopefully I can get this back on the road because I had a backup of everything but the last 25 games that I was testing when it failed.

 

Thanks,

outofwork

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I partitioned an available 3 TB Seagate to 2 TB and formatted it as FAT32 but the console can't see the external drive.  i did this because I didn't want to spend $100 on another 2 TB drive.  I am probably suffering from ACRS <BSEG> and I can't remember if I had to do anything special when I intially did this about three years ago to get the console to recognize the external drive.

ASSUMPTIONS (which obviously may not be valid)/Questions :

1) Even though the external drive is 3 TBs, I partitioned it to 2 TBs and formatted it as FAT32 so I'm thinking that the fact that it's 3 TBs is not the problem.  Could the unallocated space (1 TB) on the drive be causing the problem?

2) I believe that the sector size on the external drive is 512.  Could that be the problem?  Is the sector size critical?

3) I "assume" that the volume label of the external drive is not a critical issue.

4) The partition is Primary and Active.

Hopefully I can get this back on the road because I had a backup of everything but the last 25 games that I was testing when it failed.

 

Thanks,

outofwork

1) Did you use MBR for the Partition table or GPT? not sure if the Xbox 360 understands GPT... also, did you make sure the first partition is the 2TB one?

2) That's not the problem ;)

3) Volume label doesn't matter...

4) Should be ok that way

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It's MBR and yes, it is the first partition on the drive.  It is a bit puzzling.  Is there any way to look at an internal error code to see if the console returned a condition code or something similar when it tried to open the drive?

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It's MBR and yes, it is the first partition on the drive.  It is a bit puzzling.  Is there any way to look at an internal error code to see if the console returned a condition code or something similar when it tried to open the drive?

There's no debugging information like that available i'm afraid :(

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Out of curriosity, Did you try taking the original 2tb drive out of its external enclosure and hooking it up directly to an onboard sata port? It may be worth trying, as the usb to sata converter may be the problem here.

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No I haven't tried that but it's a good idea.  I'd still like to know why the console can't see the new external drive.  I must be missing something.  I'd almost bet that if I had a new 2 TB drive it would work fine.

Given that I believe that FSD runs on top of the MS dashboard that FSD depends on MS to recognize the fact that there is an external drive attached and FSD simply accesses the drive through a standard interface.  There must be something occurring when the console first boots up and "sees" the fact that an external drive is attached and then something isn't correct and there isn't any recognition or access.

 

Thanks,

outofwork

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Update - Interestingly enough when I go to the MS Dashboard it recognizes the external drive only when I plug it in or unplug it.  By recognize I mean that a message appears indicating that "Detected Storage Device Change Refreshing Mounted Drives" but the drive does not appear as external storage.  It appears to me that there is something on the drive itself that is creating the problem.  Either the fact that it is a 3 TB drive, the fact that it is partitioned with a 2 TB partition being the first partition (MBR, Primary partition and Active) and the remaining 1 TB exists as unallocated space or something else.  I am determined to figure out what is causing this.

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Update - Interestingly enough when I go to the MS Dashboard it recognizes the external drive only when I plug it in or unplug it.  By recognize I mean that a message appears indicating that "Detected Storage Device Change Refreshing Mounted Drives" but the drive does not appear as external storage.  It appears to me that there is something on the drive itself that is creating the problem.  Either the fact that it is a 3 TB drive, the fact that it is partitioned with a 2 TB partition being the first partition (MBR, Primary partition and Active) and the remaining 1 TB exists as unallocated space or something else.  I am determined to figure out what is causing this.

You of course did FAT32 and not exFAT/NTFS?

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Yes, I did FAT32 and you wouldn't believe how difficult it was to find something that would actually format a 2 TB drive.  Windows 7 will definitely only format 32 GBs, not the entire 2 TBs.  I used a program called Macrorit.  I wish to hell that I could remember how I set the drive up three years ago.

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Yes, I did FAT32 and you wouldn't believe how difficult it was to find something that would actually format a 2 TB drive.  Windows 7 will definitely only format 32 GBs, not the entire 2 TBs.  I used a program called Macrorit.  I wish to hell that I could remember how I set the drive up three years ago.

Try using GUIFormat, might solve the problem... it's a specialized program that ONLY formats to FAT32

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I know that I am grasping for straws here but I wonder if the fact that the 3 TB drive is USB 3.0 is the problem?  I know that USB 3.0 is supposed to be completely compatible with USB 2.0. 

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It can generally happen that the SATA-USB Controller from an external USB HD is bitching around on your Xbox 360. Try Swizzy hint and use a program thats only formatted in FAT32. I am using Fat32Formatter. It works perfectly for external HDs. You can formatted your HD, over the entire 2 TB in FAT32.

Fat32FormatterEN.zip

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I know that I am grasping for straws here but I wonder if the fact that the 3 TB drive is USB 3.0 is the problem?  I know that USB 3.0 is supposed to be completely compatible with USB 2.0.

it's not a usb revision problem, if it was the dashboard wouldn't be able to see it in the first place etheir, however... my guess is that it's a filesystem/partition table issue

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Just for the hell of it I tried to get the MS Dashboard function to format the 3 TB drive that I set up the first partition as 2 TB.  I think that it would only set up a 32 GB partition but I just wanted to see if it could write to the drive.  It can't.  I get back an error message that says an error occurred performing the function or something very similar.  What a PITA.  For the life of me I can't remember exactly how I set this up a couple of years ago when I initially got the RGH console.  I had no trouble and it worked perfectly.  I need to start writing things down.

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I am probably going to bite the bullet and buy a new 2 TB external drive.  Am I correct in assuming that it must be a USB 2.0 interface and not one that is USB 3/USB 2 compatible?  For some reason it appears that the 3 TB drive that I have partitioned to 2 TBs as the first partition will simply not work.  I wonder if it because this 3 TB drive is USB3/USB2 compatible and console can't follow the handshaking protocol that might be initially different for a USB3/USB2 drive?

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I am probably going to bite the bullet and buy a new 2 TB external drive.  Am I correct in assuming that it must be a USB 2.0 interface and not one that is USB 3/USB 2 compatible?  For some reason it appears that the 3 TB drive that I have partitioned to 2 TBs as the first partition will simply not work.  I wonder if it because this 3 TB drive is USB3/USB2 compatible and console can't follow the handshaking protocol that might be initially different for a USB3/USB2 drive?

Any 2TB should work, i've used USB 3.0 USB thumb drives on my 360 without issues, but idk... might be different with harddrives... either way, if you assume that only 2.0 works, you'll have less chance of issues :)

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I would generally buy for the Xbox 360 only hard drives with USB 2.0 controller and up to 2 TB in size. Sure USB 3.0 is backward compatible to USB 2.0, but in connection with Xbox 360 consoles, there are often problems.

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Status update - I had a 2 TB external that I had been using for Windows 7 backups among other things.  I had to use the 2 TB drive because I am using Windows Backup for one type of backup and Ghost for the second backup and Windows 7 can't handle anything above 2 TBs and Windows 7 was never fixed.  The drive was almost full but I moved everything to the 3 TB drive, emptied the 2 TB drive, set it up as FAT32 and VOILA the console sees it right away.  So, perhaps my earlier speculation about the protocol handshaking/device recognition was on the right track.  There must be something in that handshaking that says "I am 3 TBs" and the console says FAT32 can't address 3 TBs even if the first partition is 2 TBs. There must be a definitive answer somewhere but at least I will be back in business after I restore almost 1.7 TBs to the "new" 2 TB drive.  

Now I need to buy a couple of new 2 TB drives at a Black Friday sale.

Thanks for the help and suggestions.  

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I successfully restored all my XBLA and XEX games.  However, even though I set the paths and the scan levels it is only seeing a very few games in each and the covers repeat for a few games over and over.  I vaguely recall that if I delete the database files and do a manual scan that everything will come back as normal.  But, I want to make sure that I only delete the right files.  The two that I believe that I should delete are in the following path - hdd1:\freestyle\data\databases\ and those files are content.db and settings.db.  Would someone please confirm that?

 

Thanks,

outofwork

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Deleting the entire data directory there is 100% safe, what that'll do is make it forget about all previous data that was saved, i'd recommend doing so with XEXMenu or Aurora...

Hell, why not switch over to Aurora all together?

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Interestingly enough FSD's File Manager would not allow me to delete those two files.  It said that it failed when I tried to delete them.  But, Aurora did allow me to delete those files.  Two questions about Aurora... 1) I initially thought that it was primarily a file manager and an application that runs under the auspices of FSD.  Is that correct? 2) When I execute Aurora it starts backing up files.  Where is it backing those files up to?  I just need to fiddle with it a bit to find out everything that it can do.  The real appeal to me for Aurora is that it appears to give me the ability to back up all the files and folders on HDD1.

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Once again apologies for being a continuing PITA BUT (pun intended) right after I had run Aurora and gone back into FSD's Fie Manager most of the entries under Drive List have disappeared.  The only ones that remain are Game, HDD1 and USB0.  Am I becoming paranoid, am I seeing things or did Aurora do something that eliminates access to these other "Drives" via FSD's File Manager?

Thanks,

outofwork

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