How to recover from the Xbox 360 unformatted HDD Error

Has your Xbox 360 HDD suddenly appeared “Unformatted” on your Xbox 360 console? With the size of Xbox 360 HDDs being rather large, it is likely that you had years worth of game content stored on it – all inaccessible now.

If this has happened to you, you are in the right place! Keep reading to find out how you can recover your lost data and get back in the game.

What happened?

Basically, an important part of your HDD has failed and the console is unable to read the data it needs, so it signals the unformatted message to let you know that it detected a problem.

There is no definitive cause of the problem. A lot of people report that it happens during system updates, which probably triggers the final failure phase with the intense disk activity. However, in the end, it’s the sign of a failing disk, which means that your HDD has reached the end of its life, or just has a defect.

How can I fix the problem, can I reformat the HDD on the console?

It is currently not possible to fix the root cause of the problem. The issue is physical and FATXplorer, being a software application, can do nothing to actually fix the problem causing the unformatted message. Reformatting the HDD will not fix the problem. Make sure you do not attempt to format the HDD until after data has been completely recovered. A format, even if partially successful, almost always guarantees a complete loss of your data.

My unformatted HDD is 4 GB

Actually, it’s your internal flash MU that has gone bad. It’s not possible to recover any data from that. There isn’t anything anyone can do for you – sorry!

What are next steps?

First, be sure to have a replacement Xbox 360 HDD ready, and a way to connect the old one to your PC. Then proceed:

1. Download FATXplorer (the beta version) and try to mount the drive’s Content Partition. If you don’t get any errors, back up everything inside that partition. Your recovery was fully successful!
2. If you did get an error, you will need to use FATXplorer’s special recovery mode. This is a paid feature, so purchase before continuing.
3. Before clicking the Load Device button this time, go to Special Options at the top right and enable Recovery Mode.
4. The Content Partition should now mount successfully – back up everything inside that partition. If everything copies out without issue, your recovery was fully successful!

Once you have the data backed up, you can copy it to the new drive’s Content Partition.

If you need further help with any of this, licensed users can reach out here.