Topic: External Hard Drive Not Working With 360 (Read 57 times)

El MoselYEE · « **on:** January 15, 2007, 02:37:00 PM »

so i bought an external 320gb hard drive to use with my xbox360. i updated my xbox, formatted my hard drive to FAT32 (max 200gb partition for some reason), uploaded a few .wmv movies and a few .mp3's, and it didn't do squat when i plugged it in. the "portable device" option stays greyed out no matter what i do.

so...what am i doing wrong? how do i get my hard drive to show up on my xbox360?

things i've tried:
- changing the jumpers on the hdd (currently set to master)
- filling the hard drive with a second FAT32 partition
- plugging in a thumb drive into the 360 (works)
- sharing the movies via wmp11 (works, but isn't an option as the person who's xbox this is doesn't have a network at their place)
- resetting the xbox after plugging in the hard drive

thanks.

El MoselYEE · « **Reply #1 on:** January 16, 2007, 08:13:00 PM »

noone has any idea? i bought this for someone as a gift and it's really a shitty gift if it never even does what it's supposed to.

maxx77 · « **Reply #2 on:** January 17, 2007, 10:04:00 PM »

How did you manage to get a 200gb format in Fat32? I bought an external 500 gig drive, then tried to format the first partition as Fat32 in the biggest size I could get it. I'm using WinXP Pro. It would not allow me to format the partition as Fat32 until I took the size of it all the way down to 32 gig. Go up to 33 gig and NTFS is the only choice.

Anyway, that might be part of your problem. With my first partition formatted as Fat32, 32 gig, the 360 reads it just fine. I thought maybe I could create multiple 32 gig partitions, but unfortunately the 360 only looks at the first one and ignores everything else.

The main problem I'm having (and the reason I went digging through these forums in the first place) is that I need to find a way to get files that are larger than 4 gig onto that partition. Fat32 doesn't support filesizes over that limit, so either some trickery will have to be done to get the files on there, or the 360 will have to somehow be able to recognize NTFS. I imagine you're going to run into that wall yourself once you get the 360 to recognize the partition. WMV files in HD tend to be over 4 gigs usually.

Kind of a bummer to buy one of these huge external drives and then find out the 360 doesn't play too nicely with 'em. Either a hacker will miraculasly figure out how to get it to work with NTFS, or MS will get around to adding NTFS support.

El MoselYEE · « **Reply #3 on:** January 18, 2007, 09:23:00 PM »

i used partition magic. it lets you create bigger partitions, though i'm not sure why it's not letting me make it bigger than 200gb.

i still can't figure out why it's not recognizing it...do i have to make it smaller than 32gb? if anyone has any ideas please lemme know.

thanks.

El MoselYEE · « **Reply #4 on:** January 20, 2007, 10:38:00 PM »

i figured out that you must format the drive as a PRIMARY PARTITION, not a LOGICAL PARTITION. just in case anyone else was wondering.

now my only problem is i have a 320gb hard drive and partition magic only formats it to a maximum of just below 200gb...how do i get my extra ~ 100gb so it's not wasted?

El MoselYEE · « **Reply #5 on:** January 20, 2007, 11:32:00 PM »

forgive me for posting so many times.

the 200gb limit on FAT32 is a limitation on norton's partition magic. I obtained a copy of acronis disk director, and it allows me to use my full 320gb.

hopefully this helps someone.

Phazzer · « **Reply #6 on:** January 20, 2007, 11:43:00 PM »

Try formatting in NTFS. I use a 1gig flash drive for some of my videos and it's formatted in NTFS and it works just fine. Of course my xbox is one of the most recent made (Purchased Dec. 20) so I'm not sure if that has to do anything with it. Anyway try formatting as a primary partition with NTFS.

maxx77 · « **Reply #7 on:** January 22, 2007, 04:05:00 PM »

QUOTE(Phazzer @ Jan 21 2007, 06:50 AM)

Try formatting in NTFS. I use a 1gig flash drive for some of my videos and it's formatted in NTFS and it works just fine. Of course my xbox is one of the most recent made (Purchased Dec. 20) so I'm not sure if that has to do anything with it. Anyway try formatting as a primary partition with NTFS.

That's actually how I formatted mine to begin with. Primary partition was NTFS. 360 wouldn't recognize it. It was a 500 gig NTFS partition though. Maybe it's not a Fat32/NTFS issue at all and is simply a matter of how many gigs the 360 can deal with. The limit could be somewhere between 320-500gig. I could test that out, but I've already loaded up my new drive with so much data that I wouldn't be able to easily re-format it without losing a lot of files. Just for the sake of science I may test out a 300 gig NTFS partition (set as the Primary partition) someday and see what happens.

I've managed to get around my external hard drive issue for now by just using TVersity. Originally, I was under the impression that 802.11g wouldn't be fast enough to stream HD content, which is why I thought to get an external drive and connect it directly to the 360. Turns out I was wrong about the streaming. WMV-HD movies in 1080p stream just fine over .11g. I currently have the external drive connected to my PC, with the contents shared in TVersity. It's not quite what I originally had in mind, but it works just as well, and I don't have to move the drive back and forth between the 360 and PC. It's not a working solution for people without a way to network their PC and 360 though.

Author Topic: External Hard Drive Not Working With 360 (Read 57 times)