Xbox one suddenly not detecting external hard drive

Hello Justine!

It seems that there is an issue with an external hard drive being detected, and we would enjoy to be of assistance.

We suggest to follow the procedures provided here at our How to restart or power cycle your Xbox One console article, and as a last resort we suggest our Soft Factory Reset the console by selecting:

Reset and keep my games & apps. You should use this option as your primary choice when troubleshooting. It will reset the OS and delete all potentially corrupted data without deleting your games or apps. This will save you from downloading or reinstalling the large game files. In some cases, if a corrupt game file is causing the issue you're troubleshooting, you may have to choose Reset and remove everything, but you should always start with Reset and keep my games & apps and save Reset and remove everything as a last resort.

We would like to hear the feedback after trying these steps to try and get the hard drive recognized.

Best wishes!

If nothing they told you works, because I had the same issue and none of these steps worked, your console may be getting ready to take a dirt nap.  Mine happened a couple months ago immediately after an Alpha dashboard update.  After all these steps, I wanted to see if there was an issue with the hard drive or the connecting wires.  So I plugged it into my PC and reformatted it to the computer.  It was being recognized by my PC, so I ran system diagnostics and everything was coming up fine.  I'd take it back to the XBox, and it would recognize it and I'd be prompted to let myself know they have to reformat it again.  For a short while it recognized it, but anything saved to it would not load or would partially load where you have clothes running around no bodies and transparents floors.  

Just a couple days ago, I started getting complete system freezes that required complete hard resets.  Usually would happen every two hours.  A day before that, I experienced extreme controller drifting.  I went to support on Saturday evening and they wanted to have me send it in for repairs and charge me $159 for it and give me a 30 day warranty on the repairs.  That was ridiculous so I opted to buy a new system and get the 3 year warranty because it covered controllers; because the controllers are trash and seem to fall apart after 6 months of use.  I think I've had to buy 6 over 4 years.  Anyway, just today, I get home from work and when I start up my system, I get a 10 minute green screen and then the screen turns black and I get a message saying "Try again later.  XBox systems services are down."  It doesn't have an error code.  It says just check the website for service alerts and everything is working.  So I think my system is dead.  It all started with nothing being able to fix my XBox not recognizing my external hard drive 2 months ago.  Just something you might want to prepare yourself for; hopefully, that isn't the case.

Hey Justine,

I recently had a similar issue with a 1TB Seagate. Mine worked for about a year and a half and suddenly the xbox wouldn't detect it. I tried all the troubleshooting and everything and nothing worked. I came to the conclusion that unfortunately the external drive had given up and corrupted. Try connecting it to a computer. If it detects it, it may be salvageable however if it does not it is most likely corrupt. Most Seagate drives have at least a 1 year warranty so you may want to look into seeing if you can get it replaced. Since most xbox games save game progress to the cloud you likely won't lose any game progress but you may have to redownload your games that were saved to it. I wound up just buying a new external drive to replace the old one.

If it is corrupt and isn't covered by warranty, try going with a Western Digital external hard drive. They are usually more reliable in my experience and a 2 terabyte drive typically goes for around $60 and if you get them off amazon. If you don't have Amazon prime you might want to check out Newegg as well because they offer free 3 day shipping.

Hope this helps

Nate

Do you have a PC you can connect it to and if so, is it detected if you hook it up to that? If it's a Windows PC you'll have to look in Disk Management for the drive as it won't show in File Explorer due to it being formatted for use with the Xbox.

If you've tried all of the following.....

• Hard resetting the console
• A different USB port on the console
• A different USB cable
• A factory reset

….and the drive is still recognised normally in Disk Management in Windows, then you're probably going to have to format the drive.

I've had this happen twice now, with different drives, and in both cases, none of the standard troubleshooting steps worked, however, the drives were recognised when connected to my PC and once I'd formatted them in Windows, when I connected them back to my Xbox, they were recognised as normal. Once I'd formatted them on the Xbox for use as storage, they worked as normal from then on.

Obviously it's a pain, because you will lose all of the data on the drive and have to re-download it, but it's definitely worth trying as a last resort. Definitely don't assume that the drive is faulty before trying that anyway.

Hello!

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