External Hard Drives and Game Migration

SamNasarabadi · Dec 27, 2019

There seems to be some big issues with the use of external drives and game migration for Xbox (beta). I use an external Hard drive to store all of my games so I can easily move it between computers and even to my laptop. This worked on Xbox (beta) at first
as well, but now it seems to have broken.

When I took my external drive back to my computer at home after a long time of not playing games on it, it seems that when I try to point the app to my external drive I get an error along the lines of enabling it as the default app location. When I try this,
I'm warned that the drive has programs on it from another computer, and initialization will delete these. I think whatever and click yes, but am always met with an error no matter what. On top of this, on the drive itself the Xbox app folders are locked away,
and even taking ownership of the folders does not let me delete them for a reason unknown to the system. With no games installed, there's 38 GB of unreachable space now.

As it stands, this isn't in the least bit user friendly. End users should be the ones in control of what this program installs, and a full format shouldn't be necessary to get back all the space on a drive. Further, there needs to be relaxed control of
drive paths to allow a user to use an external hard drive to store games and to make it easy to move games between computers, should someone upgrade or have multiple systems but not unlimited bandwidth or storage to keep downloading the same games over and
over again. Moreover, these solutions should not be anti-competition, by which I mean storing games on a drive using Xbox (beta) shouldn't make it more difficult to use that drive to store games from say Steam or somewhere else.

:)

Ambassador Kingz

Hey there, this is great feedback but be sure to use the feedback button found in the Xbox (Beta) app to ensure the developers see this information. I've not personally tried using external drives with the Xbox (Beta) app but appreciate the heads up!

DrifterX22

Plug the external hard drive into a USB port on the XBOX. The USB drive needs to be at least USB 3.0 and 256GB or larger. Go into the system settings and storage, locate the drive, run a quick format on it. Once that is done you can set that drive as
the default install option for your games. Any current games on the internal storage can be migrated over by going to that game choose the manage game option and migrate to the external drive if you like.

DrifterX22

The external hard drive could be having a hardware issue. I would suggest picking a game you are having trouble with and via the manage game option migrate it to the internal disk. As another option you could de-install the game and then re-download
it to the internal drive.

Francia J.

Is this game stored on your Internal Storage or External hard drive? If it's on your External Hard drive kindly move it to your Internal Storage then remove the hard drive. This is to check if it's due to the external hard drive.

GreenJeans1

None of the above solve the issue. Games currently Installed on the external drive work. Unless they need an update. They can not be updated. New games can not be installed to external drives in the xpack enclosure. Apps seem install with no issue. Games
can not be migrated to or from the external drive as well. Apps migrate with no issue. The issue seems to be related to the xpack external enclosure. It seems to have stopped working after the Feb update. Prior to this games installed updated and transfered
with no issues using the xpack enclosure.

External Hard Drives and Game Migration