Corrupt Xbox 360 Saves

[Wispmage]

I recently lost of a few good save files on my Xbox 360 original hard drive to corruption, and I'm not entirely sure why. I've neglected the console and haven't used it for almost a year, so is it possible that they could get corrupted over time? And is there any way to restore a corrupt file?

I've tried moving the save file from a flash drive to another Xbox, but haven't had any success so far. Normally I wouldn't care about losing year old saves, but I have a few game completions and a 99% complete Red Dead Redemption save that I really would rather not lose. Any help or advice would be much appreciated.

[Stark]

You might try hooking up the hard drive to a PC and running a chkdsk or something on it? If the files are corrupt, seems like you don't have much to lose.

[Wispmage]

I'll have to try that. How exactly would I go about hooking it up to a PC? Is there some kind of adapter cable that would let me connect the two, ideally with USB at one end?

[Stark]

Well the 360 uses SATA for an HDD connector. You can either connect it directly to your mobo via a SATA cable or you could find some external SATA dock if you still want to do that USB option.

EDIT: Hey OP, I just found this on another forum:

You could just go to the memory option on your 360, hit Y then press XXLBRBXX. Your 360 will perform maintenance on all your storage devices.

[sonic2041]

I would try performing the disk maintenance as stated above first. Before you plug your drive into the computer, back up all your good saves on a flash drive first because your computer may want to format the drive. I know the Xbox drive uses some proprietary format and when you plug Xbox formatted flash drives into a computer there are several large files that fill the entire space of the format, even if there is no data in them. Maybe there are some third party utilities that will work.

I've never had corrupt save files so I don't know what the cause would be. I have had corrupt app files, which are usually caused by interrupted downloads. I would hate to lose my saves, so good luck repairing them.

[Wispmage]

So I figured I should post an update to this thread. After buying another used 360 recently (my previous one has trouble reading game discs), I decided to pop in my old HDD and try to load my formerly corrupt Red Dead save. Much to my surprise, it loaded up fine and I finally have my 96.9% complete file back. Huzzah!

However, this leads me to ask a new question. If it wasn't a corrupted save or bad HDD, could it possibly be my previous console itself that's responsible for not loading the file correctly? Any thoughts on this? I'm a little dumbfounded.