External hard drive no longer recognised..

Just wanted to mention that I have found if your External hard drive starts playing up on you xbox one, then running 'CHKDSK' on a PC has help and you don't have to lose any of your data. Obviously depending on what the problem is this method may not fix
the issue, but for the time it takes to do, it's worth it. Especially if you have a lot of data on the external drive. CHKDSK seems to be a powerful but mostly forgotten and un used bit of software you can try.

:)

 

External Hard drive not recognised

You say "it wouldn't finish formatting". Is that because you cancelled the formatting, or because the computer encountered a problem with the drive and stopped formatting it?

Maybe the drive is starting to get corrupted sectors, and with a corrupted filesystem, the console might be unable to recognize the drive properly.

Try to format the drive on your PC completely again.

And it's normal for the PC to ask you to format it, as the console uses it's own proprietary file system that your PC can't "understand".

 

External Hard drive not recognised

Hi,

I believe the drive stops functioning on the console because the MBR (Master Boot Record) or what is also known as the Primary Partition Table becomes corrupt in some fashion. This does not mean the entire hard drive is damaged,
or indeed, that it is on the way out.

Even a failing drive would still be detected on the console, unless the partition sector - which is located at sector 1 - was damaged.

A failing drive will typically manifest itself on the console as hard drive read errors. The console will normally display error messages when this occurs, sometimes however it will simply crash and drop back to the dashboard.

A well known sign of a failing drive is a very audible 'clicking' sound - the hard drive 'click of death'. The clicking is caused by the hard disk read-write actuator resetting to its home position after failing to read a hard disk sector. This clicking
obviously does not occur on SSD drives, since they contain no moving parts.

My external hard drive failed to be detected a couple of years ago, so I had to reformat it. It seems to be okay now though.

 

So you have to connect drive to PC, then run CHKDSK. How do you do that?

 

Hi. Connect the same way through the USB cable you have connected to your Xbox one. The PC may not be able to recognise it as it will be formatted for the Xbox, but hopefully it will give you a drive letter if you look ion my computer. It may be something
like E: but don't try to open it. Then on your desktop, search for CMD and when you find it right click and choose run as administrator. When the CMD box opens, type CHKDSK ?: /r replacing the ? With the drive letter. It may take a while but let it finish.
If your PC will not let you see the drive letter let me know. Hope this works.

 

No real need to use the /r. This forces CHKDSK to run a sector by sector check with error corrections for bad sectors. Not only will this take hours to run, but if the hard disk is (physically) faulty, it can overwrite good data (games) trying to move it
on the disk to good sectors. I lost a lot of media once trying this method. This mainly worked on the old hard drives in the 1990's.

A better option, IMHO, is to run CHKDSK ?: /v /f replacing the ? with the drive letter. /v forces "verbose" results, giving you more information on what CHKDSK is finding, and /f tells it to perform file system analysis and correction. This can fix (non-physical)
errors such as incorrect file names, free space marked as used etc. At the end of this very quick scan, it will report any errors found and corrected, as well as any bad sectors on the hard disk.

When modern hard disks fail there is little you can do. They usually either start making noises or just die. If in doubt then the best bet is to copy your games back to the internal Xbox hard drive, then replace the external hard drive and copy them back.
If during this copy procedure the Xbox reports an error, then the data/game that it is trying to copy is corrupt on the external drive, and will have to be redownloaded.

EDIT: IMPORTANT

I just tried this and it DOES NOT WORK. The Xbox formats external hard drives used for storage in a unique way that is unrecognisable to Windows. Trying to do this is only possible through Disk Management, which will require initialising the hard disk in
a MBR or GPT system. While this will enable the drive to be allocated a drive letter and thus a CHKDSK to be performed, it is useless as the drive will appear empty, with all Xbox data being permanently destroyed.

It is quite probable that the Xbox performs some sort of bespoke error checking and defragmentation on its own in the background or upon hard reset. I would NOT advise trying any sort of Windows operation on an Xbox Storage hard disk if you want to keep
the games/apps etc that are stored on it.

I would also suggest trying a different USB (3.0) cable, as cable failure is not uncommon, and this needs to be ruled out if the Xbox cannot recognise the drive.

Happy to be corrected if someone has better information, but this is what I have found based upon my own knowledge and testing.

 

Unless you're in the Preview Program. It appears that those participating, like myself, have been having issues where the external hard drive is no longer recognized since the latest update under the Preview Program.

 

I am in the Preview Program, have the latest update, and have had no problems with my Xbox recognising the external hard drive.

 

Hey, guys! I really appreciate the details in this post to help people out, however this thread is a little old. I suggest checking out some more recent posts to see if you can help them out. We love seeing you guys help your fellow gamers out, and look
forward to more posts from you!