Thunder7 recently told me that he bought a used Xbox and discovered that the hard drive was full of music files from the previous owner. The original Xbox uses an internal 10 gigabyte hard drive to store save games, patches, music and images. The new Xbox 360 and Sony’s PS3 will also utilize a hard drive and the following tip is also valid for them.
If you do not delete the personal files on the hard drive before you sell the system the new owner will be able to watch, hear and view them just like you did. What Microsoft did not tell you is that it is likely to recover the files even though they have been deleted by connecting the xbox hd to a computer. File Recovery tools work on xbox hard drives as well.
If the new owner knows what he is doing and suspects you had some personal files on the hard drive he might want to take a look. The same holds true of course for every other sort of storage device that you are going to sell. It is possible to recover files even though you deleted them.
The only secure way that I know that would delete the files safely would be to connect the hard drive to your pc and use a tool like eraser to erase the personal files on it.
You need to unlock the hard drive of the xbox before you can access the xbox hard drive in windows.
It is also a good idea to remove account data from the system before you are selling it, this can be done from the menus provided which means you do not need external tools for it.
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Xbox’s contain 8 gigabyte hard disks (newer consoles contain a 10GB physical hard drive, though it is formatted to only use 8GB.
anyway.. – I wouldn’t say that music files are ‘personal’ information – sure with old xboxes you might want to make sure you get rid of any xbox live account details but otherwise there isn’t going to be a great deal of personal data on them.. – obviously completely different story for PC’s though..
do not forget “Boot and Nuke” http://dban.sourceforge.net/
It was a long time ago that I removed the orginal hard drive of my xbox and replace it with a bigger one. Wonder where I came up with the 20 GB, is that the value from the new xbox 360 by chance ?
I’am also not sure at the moment if it is possible to simply connect the hd to the pc..
Use the Hdunlock tool to unlock the hard drive.
http://www.xbox-scene.com/tools/tools.php?page=harddrive
Thank you for this article. I have a modded xbox with a 80 GB harddrive disc in it. Lots of games and roms are on it. I recently thouoght of selling the whole system but didn’t knew how do delete all the games and so on.
I would like to add a nice 500GB hdd to my Xbox just to store my games on.
So if I use “Hdunlock” I could in fact do this huh?
thunder you need a modchip, at least that is what I needed when I replaced the hd. Maybe there are other methods by know..
Anyone knows other methods, please let know I have been buying games just if I could afford a Xbox I would be able to play them.
Finally that day is here YEAH!.
I thought the old PS2′s & Xbox’s had bigger HDD’s?.
And if that is the standerd size why? Did M$ again not think ahead?
yeah, the 360 has the otional 20GB hd.
@thunder7 – the method I’ve used for both of my xboxes is called ‘softmodding’ – can read all about it on xbox-scene. Can take a while for the 1st time but it is well worth it. I have a 160GB hd in one of my xboxes and have xbox media centre installed on both of them.. – can stream music, video etc.. from my main PC.. – works great..