Microsoft Xbox One

“Broken” Xbox One launch model for cheap

Recently I picked up a “broken” Xbox One from eBay for $69.99 from a pawn shop seller. I noticed in the photos that all the warranty stickers were in place and the unit did not look like it had been opened or worked on. The description of the problem was “The Xbox One will boot to dashboard and then reboot constantly”. I was not able to hear the fan kicking on so my first thought was it was overheating and powering off. I decided to take it apart and take a look around to see if there was anything obvious. After opening it up and giving it a quick clean up, I could not find anything blatantly wrong with it.

I put the system mostly back together and powered it up with no HDD and was able to see the fan kick on (It was just really quiet) and got the typical error for missing hard drive. But the most important thing was, it did not reboot.. hmm, could it be something with the HDD?

I tossed in a 2TB HDD and followed this tutorial and never looked back.

So all in all it was a corrupted OS and just needed to be re-initialized. Time to check out some of the Xbox One exclusives.

XBox One Internal HDD Upgrade

A few days ago I picked up a used Xbox One. This is the first Xbox One I have own since I have been a Sony PS4 guy since launch. I got excited and picked up some of the Xbox exclusives that I missed over the past few years. I quickly learned that the internal 500GB was not going to be enough to install the 10-15 games I picked up. I know I can throw an external HDD on it without issues but I am not a fan of putting an external HDD on a system that has an internal HDD that can be upgraded. After some Googling around I found it its possible without too much trouble. Here is what I did…

Removed the original HDD (Make sure to label it with a sticky note or something so it does not get mixed up with all your other loose dives laying around.. what? You don’t have that problem?)

Used a SATA to USB connector, I hooked up the original Xbox One HDD to my PC/laptop and copied the X:\ contents to a safe spot to use later. (Should be 2 folders named A & B and 1 file in the root) I placed mine at C:\XBOX\OLDHDD\X\

I bought a Seagate Slim external 2TB and removed it from the enclosure and hooked it up to my PC/laptop.

Download the XBOX One Drive Replacement Preparation Script (Created by xFix) and Extract to C:\XBOX

Open a command prompt “as administrator” and type C:\XBOX\xboxonehdd-master\win\create_xbox_drive.bat

Follow the onscreen prompts

When the script is done close the command window and copy the contents from C:\XBOX\OLDHDD\X\ to the newly created X:\

Slap the HDD back in the Xbox One and boot it up.