wangarific

My last XBox 360 just experienced a fabled E74 error and, very fortunately, I was just a few days from warranty expiration. While I was able to get that one repaired free of charge (they sent a replacement, a much quieter replacement), I realized that I still had my very dead, very E74′d five year old XBox sitting in a box. Since I had done quite a bit of research to find out how much it would cost to repair it, I thought I might get that fixed and then resold on Craigslist. There was only one hitch – I had a hard drive with a bunch of data on it (I’d long since migrated that data over to the new hard drive).

Fortunately, it’s easy to format an XBox 360 hard drive… or any storage device attached to the XBox.

1. Write down your console serial number, located on the back of the unit. You’ll need this to confirm the format, this is so you don’t accidentally format something.
2. Start the XBox without a disc so it goes to the XBox Dashboard.
3. Select My XBox, then System Settings. Then select Memory.
4. Select the storage device you want to format and then hit “Y.”
5. This will give you the option to Format the drive, which deletes everything. Accept the confirmation message.
6. It’ll ask you for that serial number, aren’t you glad you got that ahead of time?
7. Wait.

That’s pretty much it. It’s best to do this before you sell your console so you don’t pass along any information you don’t want to.