Xbox one wants to format external drive after update, worked fine prior, is already full of games!

[Beno1985]

Hey guys,

I have an external Toshiba HDD attached to my Xbox one, a few days ago an update to the new dashboard installed, since then, the drive either won't detect, and if it does the Xbox tells me I need to format the drive. I made a clone of the drive to a Western Digital drive to eliminate the hardware side, still no luck. Any help would be greatly appreciated as the drive has over 750gb of games on it!

 

[Boogieman_WD]

Hey there, Beno1985.

You did pretty well by cloning the drive. Now you are free to download the HDD manufacturer's diagnostics tool (or a 3rd party diagnostics tool if the manufacturer doesn't offer one) and test the drive, to see if any bad sectors pop-up. This is necessary, because even though you've cloned that HDD to a healthy one, if the drive had bad sectors and thus corrupted data and partitions because of them, the data would still be corrupted and unreadable even when it's cloned. The one positive thing here would be that it's just games and no irreplaceable data. Don't get me wrong, I know that 750GB is a whole lot of games and it would be a long and tedious process to reinstall them all if you need to, but they are replaceable, at least. If the tests show something out of the ordinary, I'd suggest that you try to RMA the HDD if it's still under warranty.

Hope that helps. Please let me know how everything goes.
Boogieman_WD