HDD reading UNFORMATTED - Solved!

I had the dreaded problem that my XBox HDD was reading as unformatted. Problem started with the current update, waas told I didn't have the 190mb free to apply it. I checked and the 320GB HDD that came with my Gears of War 3 Console was reading unformatted.
I contacted Xbox support who told me that this happens when there is too much corrupted data on the HDD & that all I could do was reformat.

Refusing to give up oin years of game saves etc, I used a couple of thumb-drives and kept rebooting my console. After hours, I got it to reboot AND recognise the HDD. I immediately went into Settings > Storage > HDD and deleted EVERY instance of a white
! on a yellow circle (there were over 10). I then cleared the cache & rebooted & everything was fine.

It's now nearly a week later & my Xbox & its HDD are fine. I have backed up all my saves both to Cloud & to an external 32GB USB drive in case this happens again.

My advice is this: regularly check & delete anything in your HDD with a white ! on a yellow circle, regularly clean your cache & if this happens to you, don't give up & reformat straight away; you may get lucky like me

:)

 

Unformatted hdd

I would love to do that but as I said the hdd is reading unformatted and I don't wanna lose all my game save files. i have more than 2 yrs collection of stuff on there.

 

Xbox froze during download..

Says my HDD is unformatted.