Why do I have to format my hard drive for my Xbox 360?

GamerNerdess · May 28, 2016

I have a Toshiba 1T hard drive that I want to use to store all my Xbox 360 save files. It keeps telling me I need to format it in order to do that. I have a lot of stuff on that hard drive and I do not want to format it. I don't understand why I have to. I have only used about 32 GB on my hard drive so there should be plenty of room.

Is there anyway I can get around not having to format my drive and still be able to transfer all my save files to the hard drive?

Supernova1138 · May 28, 2016

According to Microsoft, the Xbox 360 only supports external USB drives when using the FAT32 file system. By default most hard drives these days are formatted with NTFS if you're using Windows, or EXT4 if you are using Linux. In order to use the drive with your Xbox 360, you will have to reformat it to FAT32. If you have space on the drive, you could try shrinking your NTFS partition and format a FAT32 partition with the freed up space and see if the Xbox 360 would recognize it, though that might be a bit iffy.

GamerNerdess · May 29, 2016

Let's pretend I'm not a tech geek. Put that in English.

Supernova1138 :

Supernova1138 · May 29, 2016

The simplest answer is no, there is no way to transfer your Xbox 360 saves without reformatting at least part of your hard drive. Assuming your hard drive isn't full, you can 'shrink' the drive to free up some space for a partition that the Xbox 360 will recognize. If you're using Windows, search for the Disk Management utility find the drive you want to use, right click on it and click on "Shrink Volume..." and specify the size you want to shrink it down to. Once that is done you should see that the drive has some unallocated space, right click on the unallocated space and click on "New Volume..." specify the amount of space you want the new partition to have and make sure the File System is set to FAT32. After that is done, hopefully the Xbox 360 will recognize that part of the hard drive, but it may not and may need the entire drive to be FAT32, in which case not much you can do except reformat the entire drive or get another storage device just for your Xbox 360.

GamerNerdess · Jun 9, 2016

Supernova1138 :

The simplest answer is no, there is no way to transfer your Xbox 360 saves without reformatting at least part of your hard drive. Assuming your hard drive isn't full, you can 'shrink' the drive to free up some space for a partition that the Xbox 360 will recognize. If you're using Windows, search for the Disk Management utility find the drive you want to use, right click on it and click on "Shrink Volume..." and specify the size you want to shrink it down to. Once that is done you should see that the drive has some unallocated space, right click on the unallocated space and click on "New Volume..." specify the amount of space you want the new partition to have and make sure the File System is set to FAT32. After that is done, hopefully the Xbox 360 will recognize that part of the hard drive, but it may not and may need the entire drive to be FAT32, in which case not much you can do except reformat the entire drive or get another storage device just for your Xbox 360.

I had my sister show me how. It was a lot easier than you made it sound. lol

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Why do I have to format my hard drive for my Xbox 360?

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