What would cause a hard drive to corrupt?

We just moved and my little bro hooks up his xbox.everything was fine a couple of days ago at our old place with internet,well he gets on halo reach and it says cannot write.turns out his whole hard drive corrupted.what would cause this?could he delete his profile on the HDD then recover it when we get internet at our new place and he'll have his achievements and can use his saves again?it was an official hard drive.


Just mechanical failure?My old xbox did this years ago but i was so mad and didnt have internet back then so i couldnt check it out or recover my old tag.

Also,the halo disc is in new condition,got it the day it came out and never a problem,well now in any menu theres no text just blank lines.lol i thought a disc could never go bad if it wasnt a bad copy when you got it?Idk dude iv never heard of this before lol.Any help?Im baffled.

I posted this on lamefaqs and got the usual cheesy responses trying to be funny saying there was too much porn on it

Magnets bro.

Sounds like the disc won't spin because of a hardware failure.

PORN!
the good kind.


*reads post*
ohh..

Any hard drive that is not a solid state hard drive has some moving parts, and like anything with moving parts one can malfunction at any time. He would be able to recover his profile through xbox live, but the saves are gone...I know there are ways of recovering data from a failed hard drive but the software to do it is usually expensive and sending a hard drive off to have data recovered off of it is ridiculously expensive. Since this happened during a move I would make sure that the hard drive didn't just get knocked loose and make sure its connected well if you haven't already.

yea that's what I told him did he have any magnets by it or drop it during moving?He said no but you can never be too sure a little bump while driving didn't fry it,or maybe it was just natural.

I know I was soooooooo mad when mine corrupted back in the summer of '09.Lost everything and couldn't even recover it cuz I didn't have LIVE back then lol

Bama Psycho wrote:Any hard drive that is not a solid state hard drive has some moving parts, and like anything with moving parts one can malfunction at any time.

They need to make SSD's affordable already. It's like $500 for less than 500GB...

And yeah they can really just randomly fail without you doing anything wrong.

I know, I looked up a 250gb SSD yesterday and it was $299.