Why is the Xbox 360 I'm using reformatting my memory stick?

Question

I used to have a stick with data on it, but it got write-protected. Now I'm trying to recover the data, but every time I connect the memory stick to the Xbox 360, it seems the Xbox is reformatting or reverting the entire stick to the file structure as shown in the image.

I even extracted and stuck the Content directory and name.txt file into the root directory of the stick, using USBXTAFGUI!

Does anyone have any idea what I'm doing wrong here? Is it literally corrupting the data or is it something else?

Answer 1

It is probable that the memory stick is not in a format the Xbox recognizes and instead of doing an error, it just formats whatever is on the stick to work in the Xbox architechture.

I already had that crappy surprise once when I connected my portable harddisk on a mac at school, and it just formatted the thing because it wasn't encoded in a way mac recognizes.

So that's my guess. The stick is not formatted in a way that xbox can work with, so to make it simple it assumes you want to use it as a portable memory stick for your xbox and just formats the thing so it can work without having you jump through hoops to figure out what file encoding you want actually.

It might also format it as a protection: if whatever is on the stick is not recognized as the xbox architecture, and to prevent you from running some jailbreak code that might be on that stick it just formats the thing.