My Xbox One external drive is dead. Will I lose all the saved games data/progress?

No worries! Thanks for confirming this info.

Yeah, regardless of your country/region, the support pages should still apply to any questions. I’m in the UK as well

If you’d prefer to have the storage power off when the console is off, you can enable this option in Settings > Power options > Customise power options, then select ‘When console is off, turn off storage’.

Please refer to my answer in this thread where I’ve explained everything you should do to resolve this issue:

Xbox one external hard drive 3 tb Seagate - Microsoft Community

Hope this helps.

Hello,

This guide explains everything on cloud game saves:

Xbox cloud game saves FAQ

and for Xbox 360 games specifically:

Xbox 360 cloud game saves FAQ

Also, so that we can point you in the right direction here, what’s the brand (Seagate, WD, Toshiba, Samsung, etc.) and the exact model of the external drive?

As for the drive, it may well just have glitched out, with the format fixing it again.

A true sign of a failing external drive is a clicking sound 'hard drive click of death'. If it's still spinning and not clicking it may not need replacing.

Thank you for your quick reply! It's great to know I've not lost everything!!!

One quick question relating to this - I know I can easily reinstall games I own (on disc), and ones from the Game Pass and from EA (for example), but will I lose any games that I originally downloaded for free via the Microsoft Gold Account? Unless they're now on, say, the Game Pass, I assume they can't be reinstalled unless I buy the 'original'?

To do with the external drive, there seems to be power going to the external drive, so I'm going to reformat it again, and see if it still works. If that doesn't, then I'll get a new one.

Thank you again!!

Thank you for your help