Switched To A New Hard Drive - Get Red Ring Of Death When Connected, Boots fine without though.....

Hi guys,

I decided to get myself a new 120Gb harddrive for Christmas and as they were on ebay for £69.99 (from Hong Kong) and feedback was very good I thought I'd go through that channel.

I got the drive tonight, just plugged it in, 360 started, tv made a beep sound, xbox froze and the red ring appeared. I panicked and did what anybody would do...... hit the power button and then unplugged it. I took the harddrive out gave it a few mins and it turned on fine, even played online for about half hour. Thought it may be a one off so tried again, still no luck

The weird thing is, there was a 20Gb one in there previously and thats always worked fine. Now when I try to re-connect it it does the same thing.

Needless to say I'm now running from a memory card (had most my stuff on this luckily!) but wanted to see what you guys thought of it? Has this ever happened before or do you maybe have an idea as to what it is?

 

It is possible to get 3 red lights due to problems with the hard drive itself or something to do with the hard drive connecter, try blowing in the connector to remove any dust and then plug the drive back in and power on see if that helps.
The following link show shows you how to check the secondary error code that occurs when the HDD is plugged in, so you can plug it in, and see what error code you get, that might help you diagnose the problem.
http://www.llamma.com/xbox360/repair/Xbox-360-error-codes.htm
The following two errors codes might be related to the problem you are having:
1003 Hard Drive Error... It could be a problem with the Hard Drive itself or a problem with the internal connection to the hard drive, Try removing the hard drive and playing without it
1010 Hard Drive Error, Can be caused buy a corrupt or missing eProm.

 

Doesnt the red ring appear when the xbox360 over heats? Anyway... this has also happened to my old (orignal) xbox... i was play PES 5 and it froze and turned off. When i tried to turn it on again... it started normally with the xbox crest and then the screen went blank ( as if nothing was connected to the tv) and the ring on the xbox started to flash green and red... i got it checked and my hard disk was screwed up.. so i suppose this could be in the xbox 360 too...

 

If it works fine without the hard drive, then the problem is definitely within that vicinity. Either theres a problem with the HDD, or theres something wrong with the actual eprom in the 360 that makes the hard drive work, if thats the case, then you can only get it fixed by microsoft, did you check the secondary error code that comes up when the hard drive is attached?