The Negative Edge of a Console Hard Drive

[Mzo]

I come home from a long day of work on Friday... go into my bedroom, turn on the PC, the TV and the Xbox, then go into the bathroom to wash up. I start hearing some loud ass noises coming from the room. I finish up and walk back in. My Xbox's welcoming and nurturing green light is flickering to red and back.

Red is never a good sign.

Thinking the disc inside is spinning wrong, I open the tray. The noise continues. It must be the hard drive. I turn it off and on. Starts up fine. Ah, a fluke. A technical hiccup. I play for a few hours, turn it off, and forget about it.

Midday saturday, I click the Xbox on again. Same noise, same red flashes. Now I'm starting to worry. I turn it off and on. Red, green, red, green. Off and on and off and on. My balls start to retract as I think of all the Halo profiles, my GTA3 and Vice City progress... shit, my Burnout 2 and 3 progress... fuck! All the bullshit I did in that fucking Spider Man 2 game. Oh god. One more try. Nothing.

I call MS to see what they can do. Long story short, pay for shipping, pay $80 for service, and there's no guarantee they can recover my save games. "Nigga please," I reply. I try it out one more time: success. I hang up on that buster, leave the Xbox running, and head out to the local EB for an Xbox memory card.

They didn't have it. I end up having to drive out to the mall and back, now with a memory card and DOA:U in hand (don't ask =/ ). I start copying saves. Most of the big ones are safely preserved and will make the trip over to my new Xbox when this one completely stops responding. A lot of stuff won't be... not because it doesn't fit, but because it can't be copied. It just can't. I made a save in MY Xbox and I can't copy it because the people that made the games are fucking tools.

My Ninja Gaiden saves. My Burnout 2 and 3 saves. All my soundtracks that took, cumulatively, hours to put in. Assorted other game saves that don't really matter in the greater scheme of things.

I'm going to open her up soon. I have hope that there's something glaringly wrong: a large errant screw, some alien bit of technology holding up a small white flag, but I know in my heart it's a false one.

Good bye, my first Xbox. I never even saw your counter change from 50,000+ blocks.

[Opaque]

PWNED!

[dave is ok]

Are you sure that one of the connections in the back just wasnt firmly in? When one of those is a little out, it's flashes red and shit

[epmode]

*bows head in silence*

[Zerodash]

It was bound to happen...someday, it will happen to all of us.

No save game can last forever

[Dipstick]

Consumer-level hard drives have a mean time between failure of about five to seven years. The number of Xboxs that still work when the PS4 and Xbox3 (or whatever the hell they are called) launch will be quite slim due to this, outside of replacing the dead hardware.

I guarantee that all of the "classic" Xboxes 15 years from now will be modded -- they simply will not work otherwise. May not be an issue if everything stays backwards compatatible with everything else, but who knows. Disturbing in a way...

(That and if I lost my PGR2 save with everything unlocked I would probably start shooting schoolchildren. That shit took me forever!)

-Dippy

[Mzo]

(That and if I lost my PGR2 save with everything unlocked I would probably start shooting schoolchildren. That shit took me forever!)

-Dippy

PGR2 is one of the saves I could copy over =D

[lithium]

I love how gamers are slaves to their own consoles and the companies that make them. If my XBox dies, I will not buy another one. Microsoft should have made a solid, quality product in the first place. I think I can forego a bit of gaming instead of getting fucked up the ass by a company that knows we'll just buy replacements when their shitty consoles die.

This is one regard where Nintendo is truly a superior company to its competition.

[Mzo]

Are you sure that one of the connections in the back just wasnt firmly in? When one of those is a little out, it's flashes red and shit

Yeah, I did. Plus, it's making that weird noise. It's not a CABLE NOISE, pay attention.

[remnant]

Am just shocked that the Xbox hard drive sucks. I read threads like this before ( same details cept he lost everything) The way Microsoft talked about this it weas like the 2nd coming of christ or something and it breaks.