Diagnosing and replacing a failed XBox One S hard disk is no more difficult than swapping a failed drive on a blade server or laptop. Here is a simple guide.

Background

I played XBox One games during the coronavirus lockdowns of 2020/21 due to there being few alternate options for amusement; before lockdown I had been an occasional gamer, typically only playing one or two games a year during the darkest months of winter.

At the time of writing I think the XBox One is very much in it's cash cow phase with easy access to good, cheap second-hand games that makes it a very convenient and economical entertainment proposition.

Furthermore, the video streaming options make it very family-friendly as I can present games to my laptop or Android tablet without hogging the living room TV.

Diagnosing disk failure

I was horrified when my Xbox One S started to fail in the middle of playing Control. Here were the symptoms:

  • For a day or two before the failure, the console would crash and lock-up requiring a power cycle to restart
  • At the start of the failure and during the game, a system message appeared stating that the disk could not be read followed by another crash.
  • On reboot, the console failed to start. It sat with a black screen for a while, then reported 'Something went wrong' with 'System Error: E101 00000503 8007045D'.
  • Googling the error led me to Microsoft's XBox Startup Troubleshooter. Given the first recovery step is to re-install the Xbox One operating system, I thought it a pretty good bet that the disk was unreadable. No other changes had recently been made, such as system updates or installation of apps or games, so a physical failure seemed most likely.

I was unimpressed with a disk failure after less than three years of ownership with only light usage. Disks do fail, but when I come across failure of this profile professionally, I consider it an outlier. The device lives in an unventilated cabinet beneath the TV so may have overheated, but maybe I was just unlucky.

Options for recovery

With months of lockdown still to fill, service recovery was a priority. I considered the following options:

  • Purchase a new device. It turned out the rest of the world was passing lockdown by gaming too. Argos, Amazon and other retailers were out of stock of Xbox One devices.
  • Purchase a refurbished device from a retailer. Game had a very uninspiring collection of expensive, poor condition original generation XBox One devices, again reflecting demand. I couldn't bring myself to pay a premium to replace my pristine Xbox One S.
  • Win an auction for a used device on eBay. But life is too short for that much stress.
  • Send my device back to Microsoft for an 'Out of Warranty - Standard Exchange' for GBP £152.10. I considered this option but it would take a week or two to turn around, and I wouldn't get my XBox One S back...
  • Have my console repaired by a third party independent repairer. I did a quick Google to find a couple of independent repairers in my area. Typically, they charged around GBP £60 for labour plus the cost of parts. A like for like swap of a spinning disk would be about £90 and and SSD would be £150. It would be fixed in a couple of days. I considered it, but if a company can make a profit on a £60 fee then it can't be that hard to do.
  • So, I researched repairing the console myself. A bit of Googling found the XBox One S is compatible with standard HDDs and SDDs, and the swap process appeared no more difficult that replacing the disk on a compact device such as a blade server or laptop. There is also a well documented process to recover the Xbox One operating system on a new hard disk. Versus a third party repair, I would save the £60 service charge and could perform the fix the next day. The risks were that I would break my XBox One S in attempting the fix, and / or if I had mis-diagnosed the fault then swapping the disk might not be the required repair, wasting time and money to leave me with an unfixed Xbox.

After considering the options, I decided to attempt my own fix, the mitigation for the risks being that I could still take the console to a third party independent repairer if I encountered further issues.

Bill of materials

I purchased a 1TB SSD disk and a set of prying tools from Amazon. With next day delivery this cost around GBP £100.

I also used a 16GB pendrive; I had an existing spare, and I used a computer with internet access and USB ports to download, extract and copy the XBox One Operating System recovery image to the pendrive.

Repair procedure

  • Firstly, I replaced the failed disk with the new disk by following this excellent guide. Stop when the disk is replaced and the console reassembled. You do not need to format or partition the disk as mentioned in the comments. This advice is now out of date.
  • Secondly, I re-installed the XBox One Operating System by visiting the XBox Startup Troubleshooter, I went to section E101, and followed steps one and two. Note the pendrive must be formatted with NTFS! These steps downloaded, partitioned, formatted and recovered the operating system. It took a while, and when done my XBox One S rebooted and returned to it's familiar home screen.

Post recovery

With an SSD rather than a spinning disk the game load times are vastly improved, perhaps by a half or more. This is a very welcome and unanticipated benefit.

Furthermore, I was delighted to discover that all of my game progress was automagically saved and retrieved, presumably somewhere in a dark corner of Azure that provides Xbox cloud services. When I re-installed Control, it continued from the point at which the disk failed. This was good news as I probably wouldn't have found the motivation to replay it from the start.

With a replacement SSD my XBox One S had new lease of life and I could push on through lockdown playing my catalogue of bargain pre-owned games.