Need Help Putting Hdd Into Computer, possibly a formatting question? not sure Options

[Tj1627]

I recently bought a dvd burner and plan on using it to backup everything I need. Because of this, I no longer need the upgraded hdd in my xbox. I removed the 8 gig that came with it and have been using an 80g seagate hard drive instead for quite some time. I removed it and swapped back in the original hard drive and now wish to put the 80g to use on my home computer.

My question isn't how to install 2 hard drives into a computer or anything like that. What I need to know is this: is there a program that can reformat the hard drive back to a FAT32 or preferably NTFS file system? I've tried getting it to work on my computer and acronis and partition magic dont work. They will recognize the unallocated space of 74 or so ggigabytes, but they will not create a partition on disk.

Any help on this would be greatly appriciated.

[bosstitan187]

im not sure but this realy inst the place to ask that ?
try compusa or sumthin if no one answers you here tho

[Tj1627]

I figured this would be the best place to ask since the xbox uses a special file format. The problem with the hdd lies in the fact that it was altered to be used in the xbox, and i'm looking for a way to change that back, in so many words.

[bobthenob]

hi have you unlocked it
if your running win xp right click my computer select manage
click on disk managment
in the below box will be your hd select it and format ntfs or fatt
easy as that

[Tj1627]

thanks, the management console got me further than any other program. It seems that I can use it now, I'll reply back if there's any other problems. Thanks for the help

[Tj1627]

heh, seems that the system management only got me so far. I got it to initalize the disk and it appeared as a local disk on windows, but it needed to be formatted. I attempted to format but windows locked up and shut down. I've tried everything down to seagate's seatools dos prompt drive recovery software. It failed on every sector upon trying to reformat. I thought the hdd was corrupted, but i found out otherwise

I reinstalled it into my xbox and booted up fine: no problems. Backed up apps, music, and games are still there untouched.

Any ideas?

[Veeb0rg]

heh, seems that the system management only got me so far.  I got it to initalize the disk and it appeared as a local disk on windows, but it needed to be formatted.  I attempted to format but windows locked up and shut down.  I've tried everything down to seagate's seatools dos prompt drive recovery software.  It failed on every sector upon trying to reformat.  I thought the hdd was corrupted, but i found out otherwise

I reinstalled it into my xbox and booted up fine: no problems.  Backed up apps, music, and games are still there untouched.

Any ideas?

it sounds like when u removed the drive from the xbox, you didn't unlock the drive again, hence the failure messages when tryin to do things to it.

[Tj1627]

thats what i was thinking. I grabbed a tutorial on unlocking it (tutorial seems based around what i need) at http://www.xbox-scene.com/articles/pc-hdd.php i get hung up after i reboot into dos and run the programs. when i should select a hd, choices 1-4 read as "device not ready" is there any easier way to unlock hdd?

Edit: i had a revelation and used the x3 bios to unlock. everything is in order now. thnks for the help.

This post has been edited by Tj1627: Aug 3 2005, 09:06 PM