hard drive compatibility

chrisneill

Hi - first up, my tech knowledge is barely minimal, so please bear this in mind if you respond.  My son has an X Box 1 (500gb).  For Easter I bought him an external hard drive (Bipra 500gb).  Info suggested that I simply plug in and will be presented with an option to format the drive and use as storage.  This did not happen.  I plugged into my laptop and all was ok.  Found a post on the web that said I could reformat the drive from one format (cannot remember) to FAT32.  This I did.  I plugged into the X Box and everything worked perfectly.  Problem is, the Xbox seems to lose sight of the hard drive once it has been turned off/turned on again.  Havent plugged back into the laptop, but assume that I will have to go through the reformatting process again to FAT32 (I have no idea what this means, but it did work).  How can I format the hard drive so that the X box always recognises it?  Hope that all makes sense.

next010

I don't think it's a file system issue, rather it's a discovery issue.

In normal circumstances the Xbox should have seen the drive then offered to format the drive for you, that it didn't suggests a fault on the external drive side. Could be power delivery issues, manufacturer cutting corners somewhere, issues with the USB controller bridge in the HDD enclosure.

Things you can do;
* replace the USB cable
* if the enclosure has a power supply (looking at photo it seems to have an optional one) then plug it in too as the drive may be demanding more power than the USB controller can deliver.

If those don't work and if you can return the drive get something from one of the brand name HDD manufacturers like Western Digital, Seagate or Samsung instead.

Stulock Holmes

Is it USB 3.0? I think it needs to be for Xbox one.

Troubleshoot External Storage Drive Detection | Xbox One External Storage

chrisneill

I think I have inadvertently misled you following a few tries last night.  The problem is not with the format as I tried NTFS as well as FAT.  When I plug it into the X Box after formatting all works well.  When I turn it off and then try it again (after turning on) it has lost its partitioning.  I have no idea what this means but partitioning the hard drive was part of the process that enabled it to work.  Hope that makes some sense.

next010

Basically raw hdd->partition (think container)-> file system (NTFS/FAT)->data

If the hdd drive is losing it's partition then something is very wrong, either the actual drive is faulty in which case return it or the partition table has been corrupted.

You can erase the partition data by using a utility called diskpart, follow this guide to clean it. Plug drive back into Xbox let it format if it asks, if the problem persists it's the HDD.