External Hard Drive Preventing Games from Starting

jordlewis98 · Dec 8, 2016

Had a Toshiba 3TB External Hard Drive for a bout a year now, and the other week it's started to act up.

Most of my games were installed on it, everything worked as usual, could play any games, install any games just fine.

Then the other week I was reinstalling a game to the External Drive and it got stuck at 8%. No activity whatsoever in terms of download % or download speed, just stuck. So I tired to cancel the download/uninstall the game from the External Drive but it wasnt
having any of it, just remained put. Tried playing a different game but regardless of where it was installed I got the "this game took too long to start" error message.

As soon as I unplugged the External Drive I could play and install games on the internal drive just fine.

Reformatted the External Drive twice via the devices manager on PC, then reformatted for Xbox one yet it still behaves in the same way. The issue with the games not playing doesn't seem to start until I try to install a game to the External Drive.

Seems like an issue with the Drive but I'm no expert. Has anyone come across something like this before? Any help appreciated!

:)

Fenix Law · Dec 8, 2016

Transferring games

Can I transfer my games from one external hard drive to another external hard drive.

KiericSonnen77 · Dec 8, 2016

All my games are gone

After the recent update, all my games have disappeared from my external hard drive. In system setting storage, it list the external hard drive and says 242.3 GB of 2.8tb free. But under my games and apps it shows no games on the external hard drive only
the games on the internal hard drive.

Mister Mascot · Dec 9, 2016

Hey there jordlewis98,

It's something I've seen before and usually it comes down to the hard drive is failing and needs to be either replaced or serviced. Since it's only about a year old, it's possible it could be under a warranty. I'd reach out to Toshiba to see about the potential
for warranty service. Have you tried to copy a fully installed game from the internal drive to the external as well? If so, did it have the same issue?

Mister Mascot

Hey there jordlewis98,

It's something I've seen before and usually it comes down to the hard drive is failing and needs to be either replaced or serviced. Since it's only about a year old, it's possible it could be under a warranty. I'd reach out to Toshiba to see about the potential
for warranty service. Have you tried to copy a fully installed game from the internal drive to the external as well? If so, did it have the same issue?

Pain130798

if you are trying to install them in an external hard drive for the xbox 360 then that might be the problem, if it is possible, try to install them in the internal hard drive of the console, once you do that try to start the apps and to check the external
hard drive is not damaged try to start a game from there

SammyVS

I'm Samy an independent advisor. Welcome to the Xbox community. How are you?

No, Microsoft has not sent any signals remotely to disconnect your external hard drive. External hard drives are slower than internal hard drives and much slower than SSD and even slower compared to newer SSD's. This happened because there was too much data being used too much on the external hard drive and it couldn't hold up either because the game is heavy or because the external hard drive like all things tends to get worse over time until it checks out at the end of its useful life. To prevent this from happening again, graphically leave heavier games in the console's internal memory and move lighter games to the external hard drive.

KarissaBeresford

I had a similar issue. I found that my external hard drive that was plugged in was drawing just enough power to prevent the xbox from restarting. It restarted after I unplugged my external drives. Hopefully this helps!

callumewingewing

The external hard drive was around 20% full. After the I formatted the external hard drive it went down to 0% as everything was uninstalled. Thing is i tried transfering Battlefield 1 from the internal hard drive to the now empty external hard drive and
it started transferring. Battlefield 1 was one of the games that just stopped installing/transferring when i wanted to move from the internal to the external hard drive so i might of fixed the problem. Now i am just concerned that the games that were uninstalled
will not have anyting saved and i will have lost everything.

External Hard Drive Preventing Games from Starting