360 HDD initialized to GPT on Windows, Xbox won't recognize it anymore

[goatman993]

I bought a transfer cable after wanting one for a decade the other day. To test it, I plugged in my old Xbox 360 HDD with all my data since first owning a 360 back in the glory days. At the time, I didn't know these were *technically* not meant to be used on the PC, just between consoles. I heard the familiar sound of a USB device being plugged in but nothing popped up to verify the cable was actually functional. I proceeded to disk management where a dialog box appeared asking me to initialize the drive, GPT was already checked, and instead of clicking enter on cancel, I clicked on next or whatever it was that accepted. I did not format the drive. I repeat, I DID NOT FORMAT THE DRIVE. I'm not familiar with the 360 scene, but I am aware of the FatX filesystem through OG Xbox modding. At this point I didn't think I screwed anything up too majorly since I hadn't formatted. I should've known 360 used FatX too, but I never looked into it. I thought it might be fat32 or something. I've used Xplorer360 so I'm not sure why I never put two and two together. Anyways, so I move on to Xplorer360 and the drive is not detected. So I put the drive back in my console thinking, worst case scenario, I lost all my data but I can just reformat the drive and still use it. Wrong. 360 won't recognize the drive now either. So, what can I do to fix this, if anything? I did some Google-fu, found a program named Xport which I previously hadn't heard of. That program actually DID detect the drive, partition 2 and 3 being explorable (already backed them up). Partition 1 has no drop down menu. Is that normal? Or is that the partition that my initialization to GPT has ruined? Any searches for Xbox 360 partition 1 have been fruitless... sorry for the novel, I'm wordy.

 

[InsaneNutter]

Does the hard drive show in the memory section on the 360 as unformatted? if so you can just format it again.

I suspect you might well have erased the security sector when you initialized the drive to GPT sadly.

You can try this to flash a security sector for the same size of the drive in windows if not: https://digiex.net/threads/xbox-360-how-to-flash-your-hddss-bin-in-windows.8569/ however I dont think anyone has actually had any luck fixing the drive doing this from what I recall.

 

[goatman993]

Does the hard drive show in the memory section on the 360 as unformatted? if so you can just format it again.

I suspect you might well have erased the security sector when you initialized the drive to GPT sadly.

You can try this to flash a security sector for the same size of the drive in windows if not: https://digiex.net/threads/xbox-360-how-to-flash-your-hddss-bin-in-windows.8569/ however I dont think anyone has actually had any luck fixing the drive doing this from what I recall.

No, it doesn't show up in the storage section of the 360. Xplorer won't detect it either, but that program has been glitchy/given me problems in the past. What's strange is Xport detects it and all the data seems to be intact. Thanks, I will follow the steps in the thread you linked and hopefully it will yield good results. I was hoping there would be some kind of simpler solution since I didn't format the drive and Partition 2 and 3 seem to be intact, but my plan was to follow the steps to creating a 360 HDD from scratch if not.