portable hard drive requires formatting after disassembly

Hi Everyone,

Hoping someone can explain a problem we had to me that has had us all scratching our heads. My 12yo son has an Xbox 360 and bought himself a 500GB portable hard drive (Toshiba) to use with his game console when he ran out of space on the inbuilt memory.
The hard drive held all his best scores, the apps he'd downloaded and a heap of movies as well.

Recently we went on holiday and he wanted to take his Xbox with him so he disassembled and packed it all up and then put it all back together at our holiday destination however, when he turned it on, he got a message saying the previously functioning hard
drive was not formatted for the Xbox and did he want to format it again? Of course he said no and it was left untouched for the duration of our holiday.

We assumed that it was something to do with not having wifi and perhaps once we were back home and the Xbox was once again connected to our local network, everything would be fine but unfortunately, the Xbox is still refusing to acknowledge and read the
previously perfectly functioning Toshiba portable hard drive.

Is this just something random that has occurred to our hardware or is there an inbuilt function into Xbox that each hard drive added to the machine will require formatting each time it's unplugged?

:)

 

portable hard drive

Unfortunately, this is still the case. USB drives are limited to 32GB.

Fortunately, the current preview of the next dashboard is testing support for 2TB usb drives. Someday soonish, you should be able to use a larger external usb drive.

 

portable hard drive

Hi I have a xbox 360 elite with 120gb hard drive, this has been full for a while and i am getting fed up of deleting a game to download another, however i am finding it difficult to find a bigger hard drive for it, the attendant in game even told me that
getting bigger hard drive for this old machine would be difficult and he recommended getting a portable hard drive.

Before I spend my hard earned cash on a 500gb portable hard drive I have looked on forums and see lots of posts saying that the xbox would only recognise 32gb of the drive as it would be plugged in the usb port.

As these were older posts I was hoping this is not the case anymore and this situation has been resolved so I can buy a 500gb portable drive and my will recogmise it as a 500gb portable drive?

Many thanks

 

Best to write to the support forum here at xbox.com.

.

You might have to reformat it, or there could be a workaround via your PC.

Call support or post in the support forums as this forum is rather quiet.