The storage capacity of Microsoft‘s Xbox One consoles is easily expandable using an external hard drive with a USB connection. However, if you no longer need this additional storage and want to reuse it (or if your console has broken down and you want to take advantage of its internal disk ), you will find yourself in the position that if you connect it to a PC, the system does not recognize it. . Fortunately, all is not lost and in this article we are going to tell you what you must do to use an Xbox disc on a PC .
One might think that since Microsoft develops both Windows and Xbox, you could swap the storage drives between the console and the PC with no problem. Unfortunately that is not the case, and once you have formatted a disc for use on the Xbox, it will no longer work on PC.
All games, whether downloaded or on physical disk, store their data in console storage to improve loading times. Since most of the data is stored on the console disk, Microsoft does not want anyone to be able to access this data from a PC right off the bat (in order to reduce piracy), and so it decided to use a system different files, which are not recognized by Windows or Linux PCs.
How to reuse an Xbox disc on a PC
The first thing to keep in mind is that since a PC is not able to recognize the file system of a hard drive formatted for Xbox, that data is inaccessible and will be lost if you want to reuse the drive on a PC. Therefore, you must be aware that if you do not want to lose anything you should make a backup copy of the disk in question.
Make a backup to avoid losing data
If in your case you want to reuse an external USB disk, you can always transfer all its data to the internal storage of the console so as not to lose anything. Just go to the console options menu (by pressing the Xbox button on the controller), Profile and System, Settings, System, Storage and select the option “Backup“.
In the next window you will see the storage of the console and the connected external disk. Just follow the wizard and transfer all the data from the external disk to the internal storage of the console (you have the option to check “Select all”.
Format the disk for use on PC
Once you are sure that all your data is safe and that you will not lose anything (or if you are aware that the data on the disk is going to be lost), you will have to connect it to a Windows PC. Initially the system will not recognize the disk, so we must format it with a file system that the computer does recognize. To do this, right-click on the Start button and select “Disk Management”.
Here you will see that there are two sections, the upper part with a list of the storage devices connected to the PC, and in the lower section a view of the partitions of each of the drives. You must identify which of these at the bottom corresponds to the disk you have connected, the one that was from the Xbox, right-click on it and click on “Initialize disk”.
Once the disk is initialized, we now have to format it with a file system that Windows recognizes. To do this, simply click on the black portions marked “Unallocated space” with the right mouse button and select the option “Create simple volume”. This will launch a wizard that will guide us through the partition creation process, in which you simply have to make sure that you use the NTFS file system .
Once that is done, you can use the disk on any Windows PC as normal.
