How I transferred the data over to my 120GB drive.

RichKS

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I don't know if this is going to be helpful to anyone, but I thought it couldn't hurt to post it here.

I recently bought a 120 GB drive for my Xbox. It seemed like a good idea at the time and it was cheap off some bloke on these very forums. It's a US version and came with the transfer cable, but not the software needed to do the transfer. Even if it had, apparently the software which comes with the US version doesn't work on UK 360s.

I don't have a memory unit and wanted to get my data transferred. Being the "poke it and figure out how it works" type, I had a play around and managed to get it all transferred after a few false starts. It all seems to be OK and working fine now, but I've only tested my XBLA games, some demos and game saves. Also some videos. Haven't looked for my ripped music, but didn't have much anyway and really only played about with that since I have a Squeezebox for that sort of thing.

This is what I did which finally worked:

I plugged the new drive into the transfer cable and connected it to my PC. The PC saw it as a mass storage device, which I was only slightly surprised by. It shows up in the Disk Manager as unformatted and gives you the option to initialise it. Since IIRC the 360 file system is bespoke and not readable, this was also not a surprise. Obviously, initialising it under windows would effectively kill it's usefulness as a 360 drive, so I didn't do that.

I then installed Datel's Xport 360, which I downloaded free from their website. It says it supports 120 gig drives and I can safely say that it does. (I'm pretty sure I'd be OK to like to that software here, but not 100% sure so i won't. It's legal and all and pretty easy to find)

Fired up Xport 360 with the drive connected and it saw it fine. Looked at Partition 3 and found the Content directory. Had a nose about, all looked pretty straightforward and I have a healthy "DO NOT TOUCH" attitude to stuff like that, so didn't bugger about with anything.

I shut down Xport 360, stopped and disconnected the drive and transfer cable and then plugged in my old 20 gig drive. Same thing, only obviously more in the Content directory because I have many save games. Exported the whole Content directory to my PC (Drag and drop in Xport 360). That took ages, I probably should have deleted the demos first, but there you have it. Closed Xport 360, stopped the drive, unplugged it, plugged in the 120 gig drive, fired up Xport 360. Copied the contents of the Content directory over to the new drive. Took about 40 mins. The old drive had 6.5 gigs spare.

Stopped the device once that was done, disconnected, put the 120 gig drive back on the 360 and presto, sorted.

Tested my Paid For XBLA games and they are all present and correct and play fine. Tested the Bioshock demo and that ran. Tested a video (the Jericho trailer) and that worked fine. Loaded Bullet Witch and Oblivion and was able to load my save games and the DLC I'd paid for from Oblivion loaded fine too.

My profile appeared not to copy correctly for whatever reason. I needed to recover my profile from XBL. Before you do that you need to delete the copied profile from the drive. But after recovering it worked fine.

So, to summarise:

1) Connect your old 20 gig drive to the transfer cable and plug it into your PC.
2) Run XPort 360 and copy the Content Directory from Partition 3 to your PC.
3) Disconnect the old drive and connect the new one.
4) Run XPort 360 again and copy the Content directory from your PC to the new drive.
5) Disconnect, connect it to your XBox 360 and delete your profile.
6) Recover your profile from XBL.

That worked for me, no problems so far but that doesn't mean there won't ever be any.

Hope that helps someone,

Rich
 
You are my new hero. All this time i've had the transfer kit but no disc (bought a 120gb on here too), now I can finally swap over my saves, and I was just about to buy an XSata too :eek:

Thank you very much, top man!
 
Let me know how you get on mate. I thought it was worth giving it a go and it worked, so I thought I'd write it up in case someone else wanted to try.

I originally tried doing this with Xplorer360, which doesn't read 120Gig drives, although looks like it does.

Datel's XPort 360 does though and worked fine.

Also, to clarify, I wasn't transferring to a new drive on a new 360, just to a new drive on the same old 360. I'm not sure about transferring saves, apparently some people have had saves which can't be used on a different 360 and others have had saves which can't be used on different storage media even. I assume the Microsoft software deals with all that stuff, but you never know...
 
Works a treat mate. All me old saves are working, I even cheekily downloaded a GTA San Andreas save from gamefaqs to test it (i'm not too good at GTA games :rotfl:), and it works!
 
i bought an xport a while ago, and i sold my 3rlod about a month ago with plans to get a new one, so i made a backup image of the old hdd, and i'm trying to copy the content folder to my desktop, and it'll copy a million files for about 20 min, and then it says xport 360 has stopped working, and closes on me, i've tried this about 4 times with the same result, i'm running on vista, so i thought that the software might not be 100% compatible with vista...any ideas on ways i can fix this? haven't found many people who have used this thing, but any help is appreciated, i'd rather not lose 130+ hours of oblivion saves...thanx for the help
 
sorry didn't try to take over this thread, just easier to post here cuz lack of threads on the xport, not much over on xboxscene either...just tried it again, and got the explorer to actually start copying files, then while i wasn't looking it disappeared...so hopefully ur right and it's just vista, i'll try a friend with xp
 
sorry didn't try to take over this thread, just easier to post here cuz lack of threads on the xport, not much over on xboxscene either...just tried it again, and got the explorer to actually start copying files, then while i wasn't looking it disappeared...so hopefully ur right and it's just vista, i'll try a friend with xp

Another thing to try is XPlorer 360. This doesn't support 120 Gig drives, but creates and reads exactly the same BIN format backup disk images. There is a version which DOES work with 120 gig drives called EXTREME or something.

Again, I don't know if I'm allowed to post a link here. And no idea if it works on vista, but worth a pop.
 
alright i went to download xplorer 360, and as soon as it finished downloading the "content" folder appeared out of nowhere and had all the files in it, weird but it works for me...now i have about 10gigs of music on the hdd as well, should i use the same process of drag and drop onto the desktop and copy to the same spot on the new hdd?...i tried this and the xport stopped working just the same as the content one...thanks for the help
 
So I could have used this to put the gamesaves onto my pc then at later date retrieve them? damn why was'nt this figured out before I sold my premium.
 
I tried this method, after 4 hours trying to move over 3GB of content i gave up and just used the memory card to transfer saves and then downloaded game content from live. Only problem was Viva Pinata save won't copy :(
 
I tried this method, after 4 hours trying to move over 3GB of content i gave up and just used the memory card to transfer saves and then downloaded game content from live. Only problem was Viva Pinata save won't copy :(

:eek: sounds bad, I managed to do 6 gig's in 20 minutes.
 
tried xlporer 360, but it didn't work right, i opened the image, and clicked on partition 3, and i didn't show anything, it only showed a few things from partition 2...i'll just keep trying xport360 with the music
 

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