Everyone who’s owned an Xbox 360 for a period of time is probably at least somewhat familiar, perhaps even intimately familiar, with the dreaded red ring of death, or RRoD as it’s more commonly known.  My first two Xbox 360s experienced that fate.  The first one died after 6 months, but thankfully Costco’s liberal return policy allowed me to return it without having to deal with Microsoft’s warranty repair – a much quicker option than having to wait for a box to be shipped, returning my Xbox, etc. Their policy has since changed for electronics items to 90 days.  Costco was nice enough to allow me to keep the original 20gb drive from my Xbox 360 (and trade it for the one that I was pulling off the shelf), so I didn’t lose any of my saved games.

The second one died, of course, about another 6 months from the first.  I’d left it dead on the floor for a number of months, swearing I would call Microsoft tomorrow, ultimately never getting around to it.  I finally decided I would just get another, newer Xbox 360, just so I could have two, get a newer 60gb drive, and be sure that I wasn’t going to get a warranty repair unit with the same internal architecture as the first two.  The newer Xbox 360s have some substantial internal changes that supposedly make them less susceptible to the RRoD.

So, then it was just a matter of getting my saved game data from one drive to the other…

Initially, I just used the original 20gb drive on the newer 360, but the new dashboard feature of copying a game to the 360 hard drive for faster load times meant that I was going to need more space, and fast.

I’d bought an XSATA kit from Datel about a year ago after my Forza 2 profile got corrupted.  I thought maybe there was some way to recover the saved data (which I had spent about 15 hours on), but ultimately it proved to be a futile attempt. 

I figured I could make some use of it now, though, and use it to copy the saved games on my 20gb hard drive to the new 60gb unit.  The first problem I ran into, though: the original Xplorer 360 program that came with the Datel kit only recognized the original 20gb Xbox 360 hard drives, and not the newer 60gb and 120gb drives.  That is to say: it recognized the 60gb drive, but it didn’t display any of the contents of Partition 3, where all of the saved game data is supposed to be stored.  So I was able to back up the original drive, but not able to restore any of the data to the 60gb drive.

It took a little searching, but I finally found a more recent release of Xplorer 360 (right on the place I should’ve been looking in the first place) on Datel’s website.  Datel renamed the program, from Xplorer 360 to Xport 360, which made it a bit harder to find.  The current version of Xport is 1.12, and was released on October 27th, 2008.  So, without further ado, here are the steps for transferring your saved games from a 20gb drive to a 60gb drive:

1.) Connect the 20gb drive to the XSATA (or if you’re using the Datel Xport, connect the drive to the Xport unit), connect the USB connection to your PC (and install the drivers if necessary) and back up the original 20gb drive with Xport 360.  This will create a full 20gb .bin image on your local hard drive, so be sure you have enough space before proceeding.

2.) If you want to move only selected content and saved games from the original drive, open the image you created with Xport and expand Partition 3.  Under the folder "Content", you’ll find a list of sub-folders.  Each of the sub-folders is a profile.  The one with all zeros is the downloaded content directory.  In my case, I wanted only the saved games from a few select profiles, so I copied over the ones that I cared about.

3.) Connect the newer 60gb drive to the XSATA unit and load Xport 360 again.  Drag and drop the original profiles that you expanded on your local hard drive back onto the 60gb drive under Partition 3, and place them in the same Content folder.

4.) Re-connect the 60gb drive to your Xbox 360, boot up and make sure that everything copied correctly.

I kept the 20gb backup image (and compressed it) just in case I need to recover a saved game in the future, or in case there was something else I wanted to pull from the old drive.  This method is also good in general if you want to periodically back up your Xbox hard drive (in case of catastrophic Xbox 360 drive failure).

Note: I don’t recommend buying into the story that you can re-use other people’s saved games to gain achievement points.  Microsoft caught on to that scheme really early on, and started banning people from Xbox Live who were caught doing it.  And besides, that’s flat out cheating.  What good are achievement points if you didn’t really earn them by playing through the game?

Filed under: Gaming, Hardware, XBOX