Gaming Thinking of formatting a flash drive

[grnorris]

I use a friends 360 to play on and have a profile on his hard drive but, I'd like to export that profile to other systems. I know one way (and possibly the best way) to do this is via the 360's format system for flash drives. What I've not been able to figure out though is if I can format the last partition or not. I only keep one flash drive and I use it for a Linux boot so I'd like to keep the ability to use my flash drive as a bootable device (thus the first partition maintain it's current formatting) while adding a gig of room for the profile.

Additionally I was wondering if anyone's found a way to access (read and write data to) a 360 formatted device via PC.

 

[Devin]

No, unfortunately the XBOX 360 reformats the entire drive, and allows you to allocate space for the PC. Also yes XBOX 360 formatted drives can be read by programs like XPort360.

 

[FAST6191]

Access- certainly. XTAF is the program most use for this. Once you have access to it then it becomes like any normal 360 file system.

Technically it does not partition it- it is more of a hidden container file type arrangement (although do back your data up when setting it up in the first place as it might well format it).

Unless of course you mean you have your flash drive partitioned and would like to use a partition there (your main drive is kept as something other than FAT32 or somethng) in which case I will have to bow out as I am not all that knowledgeable on matters of 360 style USB.

 

[grnorris]

In that case. I'll just wait till I can afford another flash drive. Any suggestions on size? I don't think I'll put any DLC on it (if that's even possible) but I would like to transfer my profile around from system to system. As far as accessing the data I just want to back up the data from time to time (in case the drive fails, so I don't have to redownload it from the 360 servers however you even do that).

Thanks.

 

[Devin]

Well, profiles aren't that big in size. My biggest sized profile is 20 MBs, I'd get a USB Flash Drive between 1-4 GBs. Highest sized flash memory the XBOX will take is 16 GBs.

 

[FAST6191]

There are things you can do with DLC and 360 style USB.

I believe you can do legit stuff with it but that is not my thing so I will stop there.

If you have an unbanned 360 there is the profile sharing thing (you download an anonymised profile and a bunch of XBLA and DLC tied to that account as opposed to the scene stuff and once it activates online (hence the need for an unbanned 360) you can use it on your 360) but that looks be heading away with the next dash and assuming you care about such things it has never sat well with me.

What you can do though is the PIRS DLC- stuff that came with some GOTY versions of games and the like (the other two options are GTA 4 style- a disc with it all on and RE5 gold style- just a code in the box to download it with). The list is fairly short but it does include some very notable stuff
http://gbatemp.net/t257712-dlc-xbla-on-non...t&p=3166819 has some more but it is a bit out of date. Again this is not the scene stuff although you can often pull it out of isos (you certainly can with borderlands).

Alongside that there have been a few XBLA glitches at various points (the modern warfare 2 glitch springs to mind) but they are usually short lived, the LIVE2CON stuff (mainly for music games and I am not sure what goes there these days) and there is the old version of Shadow Complex (as in you will have to search for it like a rom) that had a glitch that allowed you to play the entire game.

 

[grnorris]

I'm not really interested in any homebrew for 360 (not safe enough yet). I really just want to take my profile with me to any friends house without having to figure out the net import system (which probably has more limitations anyway). If I could take DLC with me on the flash drive that would be nice in the future (I don't currently have my own 360 so I don't have any of my own DLC but sometime in the future I will) but again only if I can do it without Homebrew (not like all my friends hack there systems anyway).

As far as the homebrew seen goes I'm currently sticking to just the Wii. Thanks for the help though.

 

[FAST6191]

This is nothing to do with homebrew- it shares some similarities at some levels but the DLC stuff I mentioned aside from profile sharing is straight up 100% legit- for the few things that do it that way it comes on installer discs which you run to install and are intended to run as such. You are just bypassing the DVD step (once it is on the drive the 360 will never have known).

On the other hand the profile sharing stuff I have never liked but it seems to work and nobody has been stung by it yet (although MS seem to have blocked it for the next update).
Other glitches I leave up to you to decide upon.

Anyhow if you just want to run a game on your profile (presumably with the saves to match) then a quick format of a throwaway USB drive will do wonders- saves are rarely more than 15 megabytes or so with most being far smaller and profiles as Devin said are similar sizes. I have a profile (saves are a different matter but still easily solved) on a "proper" 360 memory card and works fine.

If you are going to start cloning profiles you will end up with the "working away from the office" problem but that is solved easily enough by planning what you do.