I was wondering if some peopel could help me out. I'm going to be getting a Slim soon, but I want to know how to transfer my data from my old Hard drive to this one. Do Slims still come with transfer cables or do I have to buy them seperate? (I only ask because I look online and don't see them mentioned in product descriptions)

 

I think you have to buy the hard drive transfer cable. It does not come with the system.

 

You have to buy them seperatley. Slims never came with a cable, they started selling them seperatley when the Slim came out.

You can find them used on the cheap. There are some knockoff cables, I haven't specifically heard anything bad about them but the xbox.com forums has a warning that they can corrupt data. If you know someone at Gamestop you might be able to transfer it in the store, it says it can take a few hours but my pretty full 120gb to Slim took about 20 minutes.

 

Transfer cable's the way to go.

 

Unfortunately, the transfer cables can only be bought through contacting MS themselves. At least, when I got one about two years ago, that was the case. Since then I've lended mine out to people I work with so they can avoid having to order one. They only go for about $12 though.

 

Nuts, so it's not an easy experience to transfer data? You'd think as insentive to get original 360 owners to upgrade they'd make it easy.

 

It is a pain in the ass. I understand that when they first came out that the cable would be almost useless, but the system has been out for 6 years now, and they have to know almost all the early adopters have had to at least upgrade their harddrives by now. It should be included in the newer bundles with larger harddrives, or at least something easily available in stores.

 

It's pretty easy to transfer everything using a jump drive if you've got one that is big enough. Granted you'd need a huge one if you are planning on transferring installed games, but if you delete all of your installed games I found an 8 gb or at most a 16 easily handles everything for dlc, saves, etc.

 

I would just use a flash drive. But then, I only have a 20 gig hard drive, so a 16 gig flash works fine

 

Looking online, I'm seeing that flash drives aren't cheap. A 16GB flash drive (which is too small for me, actually) runs between $22-$32.

 

theres certain things you cant move onto a thumb drive I think, the main profile being one of them

the cable is probably the cheapest way to go

 

Yeah, seems like it.

Thanks for the info, everyone!

 

there is a risk with the cable if you give it to someone else or sell it, it can still have youre info on it and people can access it if they know how. thats why Microsoft sells as a one use only type item

 

Well I'd never sell it or give it to someone I didn't trust.

 

I hooked the xbox up to an external hard drive with nothing else on it. Copied my files and then hooked the HD to the slim. Cost me nothing. Thinking about it I'm not sure how I go it to work exactly but it was very close to that.

 

The cable is pretty easy. You plug the old HDD into the cable, plug that into any of the 360 USB ports and go. Mine took about 20 minutes to transfer about 90gb.

When the bigger HDDs were released for the original 360 you needed a disc, the Slims have the transfer software built in.

And you can buy the cables in stores for $19.99, when the bigger HDDs became avaialable they came with the transfer cable. You could request a cable through MS at the time the Elite was released since that was the only way to get the bigger HDD at the time.

 

check you local targets for the cable. I know they all differ in what inventory they have, but I just saw some this weekend at mine on clearance.

 

I don't know if there are Gamestops or Gamers stores where you live, but I bought a transfer cable at a local Gamers store, transferred everything, and then the sales rep told me to bring it in after I was done for store credit, so I just used it for my next video game purchase. Something to think about anyways