Ok, so I've got a 120gb MS hard drive that I've had a while. It originally came off my black elite (phat) 2008 xbox. The last month or so I've started having problems loading games every now and then. Gears of War 3 would tell me it couldn't read the disc. Then sometimes updates would fail. I went and cleared the cache and usually that took care of it.

Then I went to play the campaign on Gears and it said it was corrupted. Kind of pissed me off since I was 95% done. So I had to delete it and start over. Yesterday I downloaded the Dirt Showdown demo. When I tried to run it, it said that the disc was dirty or unreadable. WTF its on the hard drive! Anyway I cleared cache, same problem. Deleted and redownloaded. Same problem. I was down to like 12gb on the HD. So I deleted a few things to get it like 14 or 15gb and redownloaded. Now it's working.

My questions:

1. Is my hard drive going bad?

2. Is there a utility to go through and defrag or clean it up? or should I just back everything off to my computer hard drive and format the 360 drive and then load it back on?

3. My other thought was to just buy a new 250gb and copy the contents to it.

Any suggestions?

I suspect that it's just a case of the hard drive being 4yrs old and needing some clean up.

Before you do anything else, back up all the data you want to save. Your HDD is likely dying. I know someone who has a failing HDD as well, though it's been holding on by a thread for a while.

If you want, you can pop it out of the case and run a diagnostics test on it. That'll help determine what the problem is.

What's the best thing to back it up with? Xplorer360? or is there something better?

Thanks

I like Party Buffalo.

Ok thanks!

Btw is that available as shareware or do I have to look in the usual places

Update:

I found it, thanks!

it's been holding on by a thread for a while.