External HDD not being recognized by my Xbox 360.

I have it plugged it, powered on, and plugged into the USB port. The Xbox does not recognize it. What could be the problem?

External what?

And I'm assuming you've gone through the standard troubleshooting. Xbox 360 FAQs/troubleshooting guide, Google, MS website, etc.. already found some suggestions, and ignored them?

A 5 second Google search returned tons of hits, one of the first was someone asking the same question. The answer was the XBOX360 supports only FAT32 partitions, so as long as your HDD is formatted FAT32, it should work.

Make sure to format from the command-line (format.exe) or a 3rd party utility, because the GUI formatter in Win2K and up will only format to 32GB by design.

it's probably not formated with FAT32

Crap. Is there a way to format it to FAT32 without losing data? Or is there a way to make a second partition on the drive specifically for FAT32, and leave the other partition NTFS?

Google does have information on partitioning your drive as well

I know of no way built-in to Windows to non-destructively convert NTFS to FAT32. Some 3rd party tools might do it, but I'd suggest backing the drive up to your PC, formatting FAT32, then copying the files back over.

Be advised that FAT32 has a 4GB file size limit, so if you have files larger than that you can't store them on that drive without compressing, encoding, or breaking them up.

[quoted1e12ecabe="dmorris68"]I know of no way built-in to Windows to non-destructively convert NTFS to FAT32. Some 3rd party tools might do it, but I'd suggest backing the drive up to your PC, formatting FAT32, then copying the files back over.

Be advised that FAT32 has a 4GB file size limit, so if you have files larger than that you can't store them on that drive without compressing, encoding, or breaking them up.[/quoted1e12ecabe]
Can I have two partitions with different file systems? I cannot back up my stuff as it's a 500 GB hard drive and my hard drive in my laptop is 120 GB, and I have about 250GB of it filled.

Yes you can foafy.....

I just tried shrinking my current partition, and it said "Access is denied." WTF?

Guys, why are you posting? Don't you know FOAFY isn't going to take any advice we give him?

[quoteca3233319c="tylerc"]Guys, why are you posting? Don't you know FOAFY isn't going to take any advice we give him?[/quoteca3233319c]

[quotee49f4f38bd="tylerc"]Guys, why are you posting? Don't you know FOAFY isn't going to take any advice we give him?[/quotee49f4f38bd]

[quotee49f4f38bd="CollidgeGraduit"]And I'm assuming you've gone through the standard troubleshooting. Xbox 360 FAQs/troubleshooting guide, Google, MS website, etc.. already found some suggestions, and ignored them?[/quotee49f4f38bd]

merked.

yes .yes.url==http://=http:///url yes. yes. yes. i did. i just said there was a different problem where it said access is denied when i tried shrinking my volume. holy shit.

I thought I'd keep this in here, even though it's only semi-related.

I bought a 750GB internal HDD and an External Enclosure. Put the 750GB in my computer and put my 250GB into the enclosure.

The External shows up only if it's turned on before the computer is turned on (or if it's turned on and you restart). If it's off and the computer is on, when I turn the External on it doesn't show up in My Computer.

Is this normal?

No that isn't normal. USB drives are plug & play in XP and Vista, when you turn it on it should appear. Could you have somehow disabled removable drive support in Windows or the BIOS?

I have it connected via eSATA. Is there much of a difference in speed between USB and eSATA?

[quote9dcebd13ca="theysayjump"]I have it connected via eSATA. Is there much of a difference in speed between USB and eSATA?[/quote9dcebd13ca]
Yeah I had to have my eSATA drive to be on with my PC for it to be recognized too, but if your mobo does AHCI it is supposed to support plug and play with SATA drives. You may be able to enable it in your bios. You'll probably have to install some drivers if you have xp, but vista supports it out of the box.

I got a new mobo that does ahci after I got my external drive so I haven't tried it that way yet though. I had problems with the sata interface so I just use it in USB mode and even if it might be slower it doesn't bother me that much.

Ah, okay. Yes eSATA is many times faster and is the preferable connection type if you care about performance. An external eSATA drive will function at the same speed as in internal drive. USB is much slower, but generally more fool-proof.

Your SATA controller (presumably you're using the one on your mobo) must support AHCI and hot-swap. Not all SATA controllers support hot-swap, but anything recent should. Otherwise I'd look into an add-on SATA card, they're cheap. I have a couple of Rosewill 1x PCI-e SATA cards in different machines for eSATA purposes.

Motherboard AHCI support is typically disabled by default in the BIOSes, and if you enable it after Windows is installed, it will blue-screen on the next boot -- you have to manually get the AHCI driver installed or else reinstall Windows. I'd have to dig up the instructions I last read on the Notebook Review forum for doing so, but I'm sure if you Google for "install AHCI driver on Windows" or something similar you can find several references.

Thanks guys.

The external enclosure came with an eSATA adapter to stick in the back of the computer and plug into an empty SATA slot, so that's how I have it connected.

I checked my BIOS and saw nothing about AHCI at all and I had a quick look at how to install the driver or to find it but came up short (I was distracted after a few minutes though, so I'm checking again).

What mobo do you have?

It's not always referred to as AHCI in BIOS. And some older boards just won't support it at all.

As far as enabling AHCI drivers in Windows, which version of Windows are you running? If Vista, the driver should already be installed but is disabled, you just need to change a registry setting before enabling AHCI in BIOS. With XP however you must install the AHCI driver if AHCI was not enabled when XP was installed. This varies from system to system, but usually involves manually installing the chipset drivers libeforeli enabling AHCI in BIOS. This sometimes requires some manual trickery because some driver installers won't install AHCI support when AHCI is disabled in BIOS.

If you can't figure it out, gimme your system specs and I can try to find instructions.

This is my motherboard http//www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813138041

I'm also running XP SP3. It was an nLite setup I did with updates from May I believe.

Your chipset (nforce 4 ultra - plain nforce 4 didn't support it but supposedly the ultra does) is [ibe1d2f2541]supposed[/ibe1d2f2541] to support AHCI, but if your bios doesn't show the option, I guess you're out of luck.

I did read[=http//www.nforcershq.com/forum/thu-jun-12-2008-602-pm-vp614263.html]I did read that you can still install some experimental drivers to get the how-swap ability in XP if you want to try that. I don't know if I would, unless I was doing a new xp install or it was a spare PC.

Or wait for dmo to come up with a solution... I'm going to experiment a little with eSATA myself to see if I get BSOD w/AHCI.

Hmm.....interesting read. Sounds a bit risky doing it the experimental way, but let me know how yours turns out.

If it wasn't for the fact that I reformatted my OS drive just a few days ago, I'd reformat and try to install the drivers then, but I'd really rather not. I can live with it like it is for now.

So if a workaround is not found and I have the external on and recognised by Windows, what's the proper procedure for unplugging it? Turning it off and then unplugging it or what?