Hard drive problems.

I've had my xbox 360s for several years and almost all of my games are downloaded to a 120gb hard drive. it's not a microsoft official hard drive but it's stayed reliable for all this time. all of a sudden all of my games have dissapeared! the weird thing
is the xbox seems to still know it's there, when I go into storage settings it says it's still nearly full with about 7gb left open. when I open it up it says there's no games on it at all and about 400kb or so of system files. obviously these numbers don't
add up.

is it just dead now? dear lord, my dark souls save (and the game itself) was on there! I'm letting it cool right now, I have the hard drive outside the console right now and the console turned off. it's pretty warm but it's always warm after hours and hours
of gameplay or youtub-ing. I'm pretty sure 360s are just like that.

if there's some sort of recovery program I can run that I don't know about that'd be awesome! I really don't want to have to buy another hard drive as they're expensive and we're kinda broke and I already had one other one stolen from me. thank you in advance!

:)

 

Hard drive problem

For the past few months my hard drive would just crash on my xbox while playing games. Recently it has happened more often. I have a SATA 1.0TB hard drive. Is there a certain setting that's causing the problem or is it the hard drive itself. I have a lot of storage on their that I would hate to lose. I'm sure its not an overheating problem because I would turn the hard drive on for the first time that day and it would crash in the first few minute. Please help if you can, its annoying the crap out of me.

 

External hard drive problems

do you have that box checked that says "turn off external devices on standby" or something like that? That might be the issue.

 

oh, I forgot, shortly before this happened while I was watching youtube a prompt came up and said something like "optical media update downloaded". not sure what that means but could that possibly have anything to do with this? did the file just somehow
corrupt my hard drive?

 

Hi, sorry to say it's not looking good for the hard drive, there is no official way to recover the data either. If you look in the storage section and go into the hard drive do all the files show a size of 0Kb ?

If that's the case you can try to format the hard drive on the Xbox but it does look like the hard drive has failed to me at least.

 

If it's failed there's no point in formatting it. Cease use of the drive immediately, replace the drive, throw the drive in the freezer, buy a transfer kit, and hope to God that your drive will be revived albeit temporarily to allow you to transfer your
data. Cold is a last ditch effort--wrap the drive in a ziplock bag and remove as much air as possible to prevent condensation, leave it in overnight. Condensation can damage your drive further, so take your time.

Sources: Me. Work in the tech industry.