Sordid: Our Affair with the Xbox 360 (Part III)

I swear I didn’t intend for this to become an ongoing feature but here we are at Part III with no signs of this ordeal being finished anytime this month. Granted it’s the 30th of April, but it looks like we’re weeks away from finally having our data migration situation wrapped up. Late last week the 512 mb memory unit arrived from Amazon and our original Xbox 360 came back from Microsoft’s repair center.

I was previously worried about flopping the hard drives back and forth but with two Xboxes it simplified things, at least in theory. Now I’d only have to switch the memory unit back and forth and the copying process would be finished in a few hours. I first started copying save files but almost instantly ran into a message stating that “This file cannot be moved between Devices”. Ok, I haven’t played Aegis Wing in a long time and if I lost my save file it’s no big deal. It was when Beautiful Katamari gave me the same warning that I realized this whole memory unit thing was a mistake.

Not only are most game saves locked to a single hard drive, they’re also attached to your Profile. Simply copying our save files in a single go was out of the question as we’d each have to migrate our Profile to the memory unit, copy a few save files, move them to the new hard drive, and ferry back the Profile data. It’s like that Professor Layton puzzle with the sheep, wolves, and a raft. How do you get everything from one side to the other without something horrible going wrong in between?

I headed over to Xbox.com to find Microsoft’s answer but if it’s on their site it’s buried in some secret PHP page that only elite forum users can find. The forums are also a mess and hacking my way through them would take precision search strings, a pack of Sherpas, and a good sharp machete.

Day 16: My search party has fallen victim to dengue fever and I’m down to my last nerve. I’m popping a flare and calling for a flashy Harrison Ford helicopter rescue before the natives flame me to death for posting a question that’s already been answered.

Back at base camp I decided to take Ben’s advice and try to mail away for a free Data Transfer Kit from Microsoft. This is what I should’ve done to begin with but for some reason I thought my memory unit scheme would be quicker. The form went out on Saturday and with any luck at all I’ll get an e-mail by week’s end stating that my form is being processed and they aren’t completely out of the kits.

At least I’ve got a memory unit now. As useless as the DRM makes them at least I can go to demo kiosks in stores and download stupid theme packs. Ok, there’s no reason to even have one. Thirty bucks, wasted. Stay tuned for what will seriously, hopefully be the last step towards finally abandoning our old 20gb hard drive.