i just got a 400gb hard disk. I have put all my cd collection on it as mp3. I want to store all my films on it to and play them back somehow via my tv or projecter. I tryed to plug the usb of the hard disk into my xbox360 but it wont take it!!!! So firstly, how to i copy my dvds onto it and how can I play them using it? Any idears welcome
mat

Hi math,

There are two things to note when using a USB HDD with the XBox 360. Firstly, the XBox 360 can not read NTFS partitions, the drive must be FAT32. You may also find that you will, in order to format in FAT32, you will also need to reduce the partition size from 400gb, downto, I believe 127gb. You can accomplish this via Computer Management (Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Computer Management, Disk Management).

Apart from that, there should be nothing stopping you from doing what you want to do!

Listen to madmonkey. I wouldn't recommend connecting your X-BOX 360 to your computer but that's not my decision. Also, if you want to "rip" your files, I would recommend AnyDVD (not Warez version). It would run best if you also use CloneDVD. It may not be free, but it's worth your money 100-fold.

someone told me that xbox360 would only read WMa video files anyway so the quality wont be any good. I dont want to compress the drive either. Perhaps the Playstaion3 is more device friendly????

It's not the devices that XBox 360 and Playstation have problems with, it's the format in which these devices are formatted in. Every operating system has it's own file system. Windows 95 (FAT16), Windows 98 (FAT16/32), Windows NT (NTFS) Windows XP (FAT*/NTFS) e.t.c. XBox 360 (FAT32). Microsoft support FAT* and NTFS. Since PS3 is not even Microsoft based, it uses a file system of it's own (EXT3).

-However-, I've been told there is a driver patch that will allow you to read NTFS from your PS3, and I believe you can download it from here: NTFS-3G: Stable Read/Write NTFS Driver . I've not tested this myself.

I saw a dvd player in lidl the other day. It had a pc indput and usn slots. It said that you can connect it to a hard disk the get files. I wonder if it would read my stored dvds???