xbox 360, account recovery from an old drive?

[clonmult]

Stepsons ooold 360 recently died, so he went and bought a 360/kinect bundle.

Setting it up for him yesterday, had an issue with the account recovery. Can't even begin to remember what email address was used (4 years back, I was married to his mum at the time), and similar with the password.

Would taking the sata drive out of the old 360 and sticking it in the new model work - ie. game saves, account recovered, etc?

[ehonda]

I did this last year, I think you attach old disk, copy the details over to a USB stick and then reverse the process. Have a look on the xbox website, there are details on there somewhere.
Hopefully that'll point you in the right direction at least.

[Neil H]

I'm not sure about the new slim consoles, but with the old ones you could just swap HDDs no problem. So in theory it *should* work.

[clonmult]

Ta; just confirmed it via a rather helpful (but awkwardly presented) video on youtube - crack open the old caddy, take sata drive out, pop the drive bay cover on the slim (which is just a button push to open), stick in the old drive.

So apparently mind numbingly easy. Was expecting to have to get some bizarre specialist screwdriver/torx arrangement for every step of the process, hence asking here.

[Spanna]

You could buy a data transfer cable. It plugs into the old HDD and into the new Xbox and you can transfer everything over. People usually do this on the newer ones because they don't have a removable hard drive.

[clonmult]

Spanna said:

You could buy a data transfer cable. It plugs into the old HDD and into the new Xbox and you can transfer everything over. People usually do this on the newer ones because they don't have a removable hard drive.

From what I've seen, the 360 4gig/slim has a readily accessible drive bay, the drive from the older 360 is already easily removed .... so no real need for a transfer cable?

And definitely no harm in putting the old 20gig drive into the slim and keeping it there.