Can't format the External Xbox One Hard Drive Storage to use for Windows?! PLEASE READ!!

AblazeKarma03 · Sep 17, 2022

If you have an external storage hard drive previously used for Xbox One games data and instead wanna use it on Windows, please note that it's no use to just format the drive to erase all the data. You need a special 3rd-party program that can erase all the SECTORS as well as all the data. 2 such free programs for this are DiskGenius and EaseUS.

First move all your necessary Xbox One profiles, games and saved data off the drive that you wanna erase, then connect that drive to your pc. When you open the program, be sure to select that drive as you can NEVER recover data from a drive whose sectors are erased. Also, the sector erasure process can take a week depending on the drive size.

Once all the sectors are erased, format the drive to any useful file system (mainly NTFS). When done, you can use the drive for Windows again.

:)

Obsessive Power

Hi,

Not sure what you wanted to do here, could you elaborate?

As for external hard drives, you can't partition them for use as both external storage for games and for use with your Mac or PC. You can use an external hard drive on the Xbox One as a media drive, though.

If you format an external hard drive for Xbox One games storage, the whole drive is formatted and the file system is changed.

XBF Ezra G

Hello CrazyGamerHere3,

Thank you for your post. I understand you are experiencing an issue with hard drive detection on your Xbox One. From your post it seems that you've formatted the hard drive on an OS X device and not Windows 10. Please try to format your hard drive to the
NTFS File System for it to be detected on your Xbox One. For more, please visit this page:

Troubleshoot external storage detection on Xbox One.

I hope this information helps.

Obsessive Power

I and numerous others previously had questions and complaints about bad sectors left on external drives after being used for Xbox One games, resulting in their costly and wasteful disposal. But even though time-consuming, sector erasure was the only perfect and correct solution to the problem.

Bad sectors are parts of the drive that have failed. These bad sectors are physically damaged, they're not damaged or 'bad' because they used to hold Xbox data.

Hard discs are mechanical, made up of disc platters with tracks and sectors and read write heads. Hard drives fail, it's not if, it's when.

There's reason why they can be referred to as 'spinning rust'

AblazeKarma03

I and numerous others previously had questions and complaints about bad sectors left on external drives after being used for Xbox One games, resulting in their costly and wasteful disposal. But even though time-consuming, sector erasure was the only perfect and correct solution to the problem.

Tezzerrific

all that is fallacy, running disk management on windows and initialising the drive and formatting is all that is needed, been doing this for many years with no issues, using third party tools is a dodgy process as most of them are/or contain malware.

this day and age you DO NOT need to use a third-party tool to manage a drive at all.

I have been working in IT for many years, especially with hardware.

Can't format the External Xbox One Hard Drive Storage to use for Windows?! PLEASE READ!!