Xbox – As a Silver XBLA user, what data will I lose when I replace the Xbox 360

xbox-360

My Xbox 360 is giving a 3/4 red ring (the top right is un-lit) and turning itself off shortly after logging into XBox Live. (It's way out of warranty.)

If buy a new Xbox and re-sign into my XBLA account (It's only a Silver account, with no Cloud storage) on the new one, what data will come over from the old Xbox? What data will I lose without using a hard drive transfer cable from the old Xbox?

Best Answer

You will lose all your save game data.

Profile information including achievements, arcade purchases and DLC content will come with you. You'll need to download them again, obviously. Any media content you've purchased through Zune, or the like, would be recoverable as well.

A possible solution for getting your save data transferred is to use one of many techniques to bring your existing Xbox back to life. Do a search and you'll find many solutions -- some involving towels, or pennies, or major surgery on your Xbox. Do this once you have a new Xbox and have USB stick formatted for Xbox use.

Once your old Xbox is (kind of) working again you can quickly transfer items to the USB stick. Not everything can be moved though... some games are jerks. :(

Related Solutions

Xbox – How to transfer the data to a new xbox 360

Downloadable content should be able to be redownloaded at will, so you shouldn't have any issues there.

For your other content, such as saved games, movies, etc., you have a couple of options:

The XBox 360 hard drive transfer kit, if you have one around.
If the content is sufficiently small, you can use memory cards, manually moving the data onto the cards, then onto the target XBox.
If the content is larger, you can use up to 16GB of USB-based memory now. So a 16GB flash drive can be recognized for store-purchased, as well as in-game (saves, etc.), data.

Once the data is transferred, you will also want to transfer your licenses for content. Instructions are available on the xbox 360 site.

Xbox – the most cost efficient way to increase storage on an Xbox 360

The cheapest option is definitely going to be the USB route as mentioned by others.

Ignoring the fact that Microsoft's hardware prices are inflated and overpriced, if you go strictly off a cost per GB, then buying the console with the 250GB drive is your best bet for the money. Using the averages prices these days

GB    Total $    $ per GB
250   $100.00    $0.40    (w/console)
250   $130.00    $0.52    (standalone drive)
120   $100.00    $0.83    (standalone drive)
60     $70.00    $1.17    (standalone drive)
16     $20.00    $1.25    (USB Drive)

I would assume the standalone drives have a warranty of their own, and the one with the console would be part of the console warranty, but I'm not sure on those.

Best Answer

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Xbox – How to transfer the data to a new xbox 360

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