So a few days ago my Xbox 360 finally conked out completely. It's a 2006 model that I had already sent in for repairs (from an RRoD) a few years ago, so there's no more warranty on it today.
Symptoms look fairly fatal to me: after crashing during an MTG2012 session, it rebooted into a red screen. Now every time I turn it on, I see visual artifacts. Sometimes it starts playing the boot animation, just to crash after 2 or 3 seconds. That means I cannot even boot into the dashboard anymore.
Question is: what about my game data? I only really care about saved games to be honest. I don't have a lot of games, but the few ones I play are RPGs, some of them (Oblivion, Fallout, etc.) I spent a hundred hours or more on a single character. Is there any way to recover the game save data? I know the hard drive is detachable, but the new Xbox Slim does not support these (oh yeah, I bought the Slim today).
Best Answer
You need to get a Hard Drive Transfer cable which will copy everything, including your save games, onto the 360 slim (assuming there is enough room on it). You don't need the bricked 360, just it's hard drive and the new slim xbox. You can also do this with just a USB drive, but will take longer depending on how much you've got to transfer.
As you'll only use it once, my advice would be to buy one off ebay where you can then sell it again after you've used it for near enough what you paid for it.
As for the xbox itself, it sounds like it's overheated and the graphics card has started to warp and come off the motherboard. This problem can usually be fixed by clamping the card back down via a bit of DIY and a few bolts. If you don't fancy doing it, there's usually a few people on ebay that do this themselves and would be willing to offer you some cash for it ;)