Backing up Xbox saves

[shmokes]

At least a quarter of the games on my brothers modded Xbox have stopped working.  He just dropped it off and I'm going to fix it for him.  In case I end up having to just re-do the whole hard drive, how can I back up saves?  My brother has a fighter in Fight Night who is ranked number 3 and is scheduled to fight number 1.  I don't want to end up erasing his career.

Where are the game-saves stored and is there anything special I need to know aside from copying the folder and copying it back once everything is up and running?

[pointdablame]

IIRC, the saves are all in the TDATA and UDATA folders.  They are probably in the C or E drive, I just don't remember off hand.

Your best bet would probably be to back up the C, E, X, Y, Z folders just in case, minus and emulators or games your brother may have on the C or E drive.

[shmokes]

The TDATA and UDATA are on the E drive.  I was hoping the saves weren't in there, as I figured cleaning those folders out might actually fix the problem. 

[pointdablame]

The TDATA and UDATA are on the E drive.  I was hoping the saves weren't in there, as I figured cleaning those folders out might actually fix the problem. 

UDATA stands for User Data if I am remembering correctly, which leads me to think its where the saves are.  I haven't backed saves up in quite a while, but it's definitely in one of those 2 folders.

[SOAPboy]

Could very well be a corrupt save breaking games.. had it happen myself a few times..

[crashwg]

Assuming you know how to use XBINS, go there.  In the PC apps section or whatever it's called there's a program that I believe goes by XBSM (XBOX Save Manager)  The program is run on your PC and connects to your xbox throught your network.

[shmokes]

ooh.  That sounds good.  I thought it might be a corrupt save . . . I think Soapboy has mentioned before that he had a corrupt save causing games to break.

I'll grab that program and back them all up and then clean out those two folders.  Then I'll push back over just the important ones.  Hopefully none of them will be the problem, but it sounds like this will at least make narrowing down the bad file pretty easy.

[shmokes]

Damn.  Didn't work.  First the Xbox Saves Manager errors out about halfway through loading the Xbox tree saying something like, "Error writing to ..."  there's plenty of room on the drive it's trying to write to and I'm using the newest version of it and Avalaunch.  So I just did a straight backup of the UDATA and TDATA folders and deleted the entire contents of those folders on the Xbox.  Tried loading up a game and got the same thing.  It starts loading and then just freezes up about 5-10 seconds in.  It's not a problem with the Xbox, like overheating, as it will freeze on exactly the same games in exactly the same place every time and all the other games work without any problem every time.

Any suggestions?  If I end up having to redo the whole hard drive I can't give my brother his Xbox today while he's passing through town (he lives about four hours away from me).  FWIW I've already tried another BIOS and it does the same thing.

[shmokes]

God, this is killing me.  First, I should point out, if I haven't already, that the games actually start working.  I'll see the proper developer/publisher logos and then, about 10 seconds in or so the Xbox locks up.  It only happens on some of the games.  The others can be played normally for hours at a time with no trouble.

I've tried:

- New and different version BIOS
- Updated to the latest built of XBMC (though the games act the same when using Avalaunch so . . . )
- Deleted the contents of the UDATA and TDATA folders
- Deleted the non-working games and loaded fresh versions back onto the Xbox (definitely in different physical locations on the hard drive platters)
- Copied the C:,E:,X:,Y:, and Z: drives from my working Xbox to my brother's screwy one

What could possibly be causing this?  All these games work fine on my Xbox and, until recently, worked fine on my brother's.  It seems like I've covered everything.  I'm indebted to anyone who can steer me in the right direction.

[pointdablame]

Drives X,Y,and Z are for data caches.  You could try deleting the contents of those, but I'm pretty sure they are regularly deleted as you play games anyway.

I wouldn't bother looking at programs and bios'es and what not.  If the game is loading, you are bypassing all that and running off the .xbe for the game.  If it's loading up, even just for a few seconds, it's not XBMC or Avalaunch or your bios.

If you say it's not overheating, it may be corrupt game files on the hard drive if the games are on the drive.  It may also just be a hard drive dying, although the fact that it's happening at the same point each time makes me doubt that.  Try loading the same game from both the DVD drive and the HDD and see if anything changes.

I personally think this is a hardware problem.  You're loading into the .xbe properly, so you're done with all the apps and bioses on the xbox.  Beyond that point, you're running in "normal xbox" mode.

[shmokes]

But here's something that seems to rule up dying hard drive to me.  It's a 200 or 250 GB hard drive and it's split with the first 137 or whatever on the F and the rest on G.  At least two of the non-working games were on the F: partition so I deleted them and reloaded them, but this time on the G partition.  I guess I could be wrong, but it seems to me that this would guarantee that they were copied to different physical locations on the hard drive platters.  But the games continue to freeze in exactly the same place.  Also, I loaded four new games to the drive and two of them work fine, the other two don't.  Both of the games that don't work do the same thing as others. 

[crashwg]

Some games dislike IGR (in game reset) I'm not exactly sure how it works with avalaunch because I'm a EVOX guy myself but I know that when a buddy of mine had problems with games not working he turned that off and it fixed all of them

[Samstag]

Deleting the cache files in X, Y, and Z will sometimes fix issues like this.  You can safely delete everything on them.