how do you get a hard drive to work with the xbox 360?

Mondo_ie

hey ppl am after getting a Philips 120 GB hard Drive thinking that i could put on movies and music on it and run them through my xbox but when i plug it into the xbox it does not find it. Is there anyway to connect the two together. any help would be great. Thanks :pac:

Jack Sheehan

You dont. Sorry.

I do this sometimes (not a lot, admmitedly) using a memory stick. I think i had trouble doing it until I got a media update when i first joined xbox live, and then it all started working properly.

I could be wrong, but if you're connected to the net, then you could try accepting the (optional) media update.

Your PC is obviously recognising the hard drive, yeah?

Mondo_ie

yeah the hard drive is bang on just not working on the xbox
i'll try and see if the media is up to date
i'll let u know

docentore

weepsie's right, the only reason why it doesn't work might be file system. it has to be FAT32. if it is not either backup all data and repartition it or get some application like acronis hdd manager and change it to fat32.
make sure the xbox is connected to inet, it is needed to download codecs

FAT32 Or HFS+


NTFS is not supported.


I have my external formatted as HFS+ with a program called MacDrive for the pc, which allows the use of apples(HFS +) filesystem in windows.


The benefit of this being that it does not have FAT32s 4GB filesize limit, so i can the watch HD-WMV films which are over 4 GBs generally.

yoyo

As stated the hard disk must be formatted using the FAT32 filesystem to be "seen" by the xbox, you can format this in "Disk Management" in windows xp/vista, just right click the "My Computer" icon, click manage, choose disk management, then right click the external harddrive and choose Format, then pick the FAT32 filesystem over NTFS, note that formatting will erase all information on the hard drive so do any neccesary backing up first before doing this

Nick

docentore

docentore wrote: »

make sure the xbox is connected to inet, it is needed to download codecs

Speaking of which, does anyone know if the 360 can support .MKV files? I have to convert them to AVI if i want to watch them on the 360..?

yoyo

Deleted User wrote: »

Speaking of which, does anyone know if the 360 can support .MKV files? I have to convert them to AVI if i want to watch them on the 360..?

Nah, Only AVIs (Divx/Xvid) codecs etc and some more common ones, unfortunately, MKV files don't seem to be considered when choosing formats to support by companies .

Nick

neacy69

Deleted User wrote: »

Speaking of which, does anyone know if the 360 can support .MKV files? I have to convert them to AVI if i want to watch them on the 360..?

you cant play MKV files directly on the xbox but if you use TVersity then you can stream the files from your laptop/PC to the xbox through your local network....

The Recliner

docentore wrote: »

weepsie's right, the only reason why it doesn't work might be file system. it has to be FAT32. if it is not either backup all data and repartition it or get some application like acronis hdd manager and change it to fat32.
make sure the xbox is connected to inet, it is needed to download codecs

Just to add that after I did this Vista didn't recognise the Fat32 partition

Had to go into Disk management and set the Fat32 partition to be active and then I had to mount it in order to be able to move files onto it through explorer

A bit of a faff but it is sorted now