Hard drive bricking my xbox?

[terse peak]

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[crystal lagoon]

Hey I just got a weird problem, every time i plug in my hard drive the light on my xbox flashes and then it just turns off, it’s really strange and I got no clue how to fix it

[dense grotto]

Would you be willing to share your Xbox console's ID with me? It's available under Settings > General > System > Console Info. I can see if your console has reported what is crashing when you plug in the drive

[crystal lagoon]

6f7a6367.57978556.4574976.0135920a.01

sorry for the late reply, busy busy day

[dense grotto]

No worries! Thanks, I'll take a look when I get into work today 🙂

@crystal lagoon Actually, looks like that number is incomplete, the 3rd set, 4574976 is missing a character in there, should be 8 long, but is only 7, can you double check that one?

[crystal lagoon]

my bad let me go check

[dense grotto]

np! It's a long set of numbers and can be easy to miss one 🙂

[crystal lagoon]

6f7a6367.57978556.d4574976.0135920a.01

[dense grotto]

That one works, thanks!

[crystal lagoon]

no problem, i accidentally forgot to put “d” in the set of numbers

[dense grotto]

And this is a USB hard drive you're trying to connect?

Any information you have about the drive (size, brand, if it's one with a USB hub and if there's other things plugged into that USB hub, etc) would be helpful 🙂

[crystal lagoon]

yea this is a seagate hard drive

500gb

external

and it was working completely fine for years up until a few days ago

[dense grotto]

And it's formatted for games, not media?

[crystal lagoon]

yea it has multiple games on it already

then a couple days ago i tried to turn my xbox on and it pretty much turned itself off and kept doing that until i unplugged it and now whenever i plug it back it the light flashes on my console then its off again

[dense grotto]

Ok, it's entirely possible that the hard drive just got some small amount of corruption on it that it just needs to be formatted and have the games reinstalled on it (it's not bricking your console, don't worry, it's just causing a crash in the software)

[crystal lagoon]

ah alright alright

[dense grotto]

If you can hold off on formatting the drive for a little bit though, I'd like to have one of our engineers look at the specific crash first 🙂

[crystal lagoon]

yea alright too easy

[dense grotto]

Awesome, thank you!

[dense grotto]

Ok, after talking with one of our engineers, she confirmed this looks like some drive corruption and to connect it to a PC, format it (as NTFS), then you can reconnect to your console and format as a game drive again. You'll have to re-download any games that were on it, but you should be able to use the drive at that point without the console shutting off when connecting.

If that doesn't work, please let me know! (Please let me know if it does work too though, if you don't mind 🙂 )

[crystal lagoon]

alright sweet i’ll try it out today and see if i got any problems

[crystal lagoon]

when i plug it into my pc nothing happens like i cant access it on my pc

[dense grotto]

It won't initially show up on your PC under "This PC", you'll need to run disk management to see it in there and format it. Assuming you're running Windows 11, if you bring up your start menu, you can type "disk management" and it should bring up "Create and format hard disk partitions", which will launch the app you see in the background here:

I would launch that application first without the drive attached to your PC and note down all the disks that show up on the bottom without the drive connected (so you don't mess with those), then connect your drive and rescan disks from under the action menu

[crystal lagoon]

ah its there nice nice

but its all unallocated

[dense grotto]

It shows that because it doesn't recognize the partition. You can right click in that unallocated space and create a simple volume

[crystal lagoon]

ohh alright too easy i just created a volume and it says the system is now NTFS

[dense grotto]

Great 🙂 Now that it's initialized it as an NTFS drive, you should be able to disconnect it and connect it to your Xbox again, hopefully without it turning off 🙂

[crystal lagoon]

alright ill test it out now

ah perfect its all fixed

[dense grotto]

great!

[crystal lagoon]

thank you very much i was worried that my xbox was done for

[dense grotto]

glad to help 🙂