XBOX 360 Hard Drive Upgrade

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Notes:

This is a fairly straightforward method and is a compilation of the tutorials at titaniumfish and IVC Wiki.

I created this because although their tutorials are great, I was short on sleep and just wanted to get a 120GB HDD in my XBOX 360.

Hardware needed

  • Windows XP PC w/ SATA capabilities.
  • A WD1200BEVS.

Software needed

Steps

You can choose whether or not to follow certain steps. Some are there just to make your life easier or to get this process with over faster.

I have a memory unit for one reason but that one reason saved me a lot of time. My memory unit is solely for me being able to take all my settings and saved games from one place to another. The other major benefit is that I don't have to recover my gamertag whenever I visit someone.

So basically, I believe if you have a memory unit, move all your saved games or profile information over to it. Even your XBOX Live account should go on your memory unit.

Back up / Clean up

If you plan to make a back up of your data you may be interested in the steps here. However, consider this: Your XBOX Live account will have a history regarding what you have purchased and or previously downloaded.

If you have the bandwidth you can just choose to not back anything up. I strongly suggest backing up saved games / profiles as well as the items listed below because those you can't download from XBOX Live or at least not for free.

What you may want to back up

Here is a list of items which you may not be able to attain from XBOX Live and may wish to back up to a Memory Unit (for the most part a 512MB memory unit should suffice for everything):

  • Microsoft had several XBOX Live outages and they gave users a few free games for compensation such as Undertow, Carcassone, etc etc.  You will also want to back those up because XBOX Live doesn't keep track of that aside from "Unknown".
  • Any content which came with your console. The XBOX 360 Halo edition is chock full of these (i.e. themes, gamerpics, etc). A 20 GB hard drive bought in the store also has several music files and videos which you can't attain on XBOX Live. I believe Hexic comes on the 20 GB hard drive and you would normally have to pay for it. *Note: You may or may not be able to move this content - I will try and post my results - however, why not?*

To take a look at your download history (i.e. to figure out what you *need* to back-up) follow these steps:

  1. Sign in to Xbox LIVE with the gamer profile that originally downloaded the content.
  2. Press the silver Guide button on your controller to open the Xbox Guide.
  3. Go to Settings and select Account Management.
  4. Then select Download History.

Alright, now have a memory unit inserted to move data onto:

  1. With the memory unit inserted, select System, Memory.
  2. Highlight the hard drive.
  3. Choose the type of item, then the specific item you want to move to the memory unit.

What you can afford to lose

Now that you have determined what absolutely must stay, let's go onto what we can afford to lose. This sections purpose is to make your drive lean. It will save you a lot of time if you remove items you don't need or use.

  1. Clear out your cache by following this KB article from M$.
  2. Remove any trial games or demos (seriously, it had better be the next Metal Gear Solid for it to stay)
  3. Remove any video or game previews or expired rentals.
  4. Remove the profiles and content from those friends or family members that somehow happened to use your XBOX and saved 5 GB's worth of their data. I have a lot of younger cousins so this shaved off about 2 GB's for me :-)

I went from 2 GB's free to 12.2 after the above steps.

To remove items from your hard drive:

  1. With the memory unit inserted, select System, Memory.
  2. Highlight the hard drive.
  3. Choose the type of item, then the specific item you want to move to the memory unit.


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