When I turned on my Xbox 360 rather than taking me to the dashboard it showed a red light in the bottom right quadrant and showed a black screen of multilingual text. At the bottom was the code "E68." I followed basic protocol, taking out all the cords and putting them back in when the system was off. Turned it back on, but still didn't work. I looked up the problem in my handy "Xbox 360 How-To Handbook," and it explained that the code E68 meant there was a problem with the hard drive. So I took the hard drive off the top and turned the Xbox on, and it ran fine. The How-To Handbook said that if this was the case that I would need to call Customer Support and possibly send it in for repair.
Now, I have a couple of questions for those who know how to deal with this problem:
1) The handbook said that by sending the hard drive in for repair I "might lose your saved games in the process, but you should be able to keep playing with your console and a memory unity." Does this mean that I've lost all of my saved games for good, or just while its out getting repaired?
2) Do you have any suggestions on what to do (other than call Customer Support, which I will do) or any ideas on what might have caused the problem?
To the user who answers both of my questions, thank you.
1) The handbook said that by sending the hard drive in for repair I "might lose your saved games in the process, but you should be able to keep playing with your console and a memory unity." Does this mean that I've lost all of my saved games for good, or just while its out getting repaired?
Chances are if the hard drive is busted and needs to have either the discs replaced or the controller board replaced, any data you have on the drive (mp3s, save games, DLC) is done like dinner. I wouldn't expect to get it back.
2) Do you have any suggestions on what to do (other than call Customer Support, which I will do) or any ideas on what might have caused the problem?
Hard drive failure could be a number of different problems. It could be that the drive was just 'born' to fail through a manufacturing fault; it could have been overheated repeatedly or been much too hot, or if you maybe smacked the drive around (dropped the console ever?) could have done physical damage to the hard drive.
As for suggestions? Well... if the warranty on the drive is void already (and that's fairly important) - if you have another device, say a memory card for the 360 that you want to dump your save files onto there's a few things that might help you get the drive to work long enough to transfer your files.
If you can, try plugging it in to another known good 360. You never know - the controller on the system itself might be bad and giving you a bogus error.
One idea is to stick the disk in the fridge/freezer for maybe an hour or so before running it. No joke. Seriously. I've never tried it with an Xbox 360 drive, but I've done this with PC hard drives before and had results with data recovery.
The second idea is to pick it up about.. oh.. say.. three feet or so? Drop it onto a hard floor from that height - like, wood or hard plastic or smooth concrete or something. Not enough height to break the physical casing, just to rattle the insides a bit. That one is a seriously last ditch effort kind of thing.
Again, I wouldn't try either of these if the warranty is still good - just bite the bullet and get it replaced. Without a PC interface though, and a good data recovery program, you might be screwed. Best of luck!
