Old Xbox keeps wanting to reformat - help please

Soldato
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I am not a console gamer so have not had any dealings with Xboxes so forgive me if this is simple.

Anyway, after the Wii U had a severe lack of games we picked up an old but still sealed Xbox. It is 2009 vintage and came bundled with Forza Motorsport 3. We got it set up and updated all OK.

After a week and while I was fiddling about updating a game it seemed to freeze. I pulled the plug and next time loading it told me that there was a new update but I did not have enough storage and forced me to format the 250GB drive. I had assumed that I killed something pulling the plug while updating and kicked myself. We had only had it a week so only some minor losses on savegames.

This morning it did it again, kids playing on Rayman and loving it, turned it off OK but next power on it wanted an update saying that there was no hard drive space for it and suggesting a reformat.

Both times if I ignored the update and went to the dashboard there was no record of my profile and no games in my games.

Any advice as to how to move forward would be appreciated. Thanks.
 
Thank you for that.

I have obviously searched Google and most of the results are just to reformat and go with the flow which I did the first time. As it has now done it a second time I was wondering if anyone here had any personal experience?

Is it that I should just buy a new HD? Try an external HD, give up on the whole thing and buy a new one?
 
You are right, I didn't give specifics and state that I had searched, sorry.

Will look into how to back up. Thank you.
 
Basically I need to determine whether it is the xbox or the HDD. The trouble with testing it is that (going on the gap between the two episodes) it will look like it is working perfectly for a week or so.

Or could it be just a two off issue and it won't happen again? Or are we doing something odd to set it off?

If it was a read error or other disk error surely the system would give me an error code? It just seems to wipe all of the data and carry on.
 
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After reading a lot more and what you said Rich, I think it will be worth getting a new HD, to test with. It will be a panic after a week or so to see if it dies.

The biggest bugger of it all is telling a 10 and 7 year old that they get to replay their games again - not an issue!
 
Well new HD in and it is working fine so far. Will be using anticipation for the first few weeks. The good news is that it came with a USB backup thingie so I will be keeping a pretty regular backup. Anyone recommend some decent software for that, is xport360 good?
 
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