Introduction: Make a Xbox 360 External Storage Partition

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With the age of my Xbox 360 and the availability games to be downloaded from games with gold, my hard drive build up rather quickly. Because I wanted to continue adding games, I needed some additional space for storage. I decided to use part of the space on my external hard drive for use for my Xbox. If you need some extra storage space for your games, music, or other files please read on .

Step 1: Supplies

For this guide you will need...

  • Computer (this guide will be covered in windows)
  • External hard drive (good idea to save any important files)
  • Xbox 360

Step 2: All Settings

The first step to creating partition is to open up the all settings on your computer. In the search bar type in create partition or Disk Manager. One of the options that appears should be to create a disk partition. Click on that and you're ready for the next step.

Step 3: Shrink Volume

Once you in the desk management. You will see all available drives that are available for storage . select your external hard drive and right click and select shrink volume . a new window will appear asking how much space you like to shrink the volume by . because of the limitations of the Xbox , It can only use partition that are 32 gigabytes in size. Set the shrink volume to this quantity in megabytes and select "shrink". You are now ready to create a simple volume for your Xbox .

Step 4: Create Simple Volume and Formatting

Once you shrink the volume, you see the section of your drive which is labeled as unallocated. Select this partition, right click, and select new simple volume. A window will pop up asking you to select a letter or a drive path. For use on the Xbox you will not want to select either as the Xbox connect occasionally has time trouble reading these drives. Once you have selected do not assign a drive path, continue to the next window. In this window it gives you options to format your new drive you will want to ensure that the file system is selected as fat32. Any others and your Xbox will want to reformat the entire external hard drive. You can rename the volume label whatever you like and then continue .

Step 5: Finished!

If you've been following along you should have a fully usable external hard drive for use with your Xbox 360. You may notice some of the available space for your new drive has lost. This is to be expected due to some compatibility formatting. This lost space is typically about three quarters of a gigabyte. The USB Drive shown in the photo is one already has a couple games on it so that's why it is not the full 32 gigabytes. I hope this guide has allowed you to keep a couple of your favorite games or to pick up some new ones. Thanks for reading!