One would think that as Microsoft upgrades to Windows and Xbox, you can switch storage drives between console and PC without any problems. Unfortunately this is not the case, and once you have formatted the disk for use on Xbox, it will no longer work on PC.
All games, whether downloaded or on a virtual disk, store its data in console storage to improve download times. Since most of the information is stored on a console disk, Microsoft does not want anyone to be able to access this data from a PC right away (to reduce crime), so they decided to use a separate file system, known as Windows or Linux PC
How to reuse Xbox disc on PC
The first thing to keep in mind is that since the PC cannot detect the Xbox-enabled hard drive file system, that data is inaccessible and will be lost if you want to reuse the drive on the PC. Therefore, you should know that if you do not want to lose anything you should make a backup copy of the disk in question.
Back up to avoid data loss
If you want to use an external USB disk, you can always transfer all its details to the internal console storage so you don’t lose anything. Just go to the console options menu (by pressing the Xbox button on the controller), profile and program, settings, system, storage and select the “Backup” option.
In the next window you will see the console save and the external connected disk. Just follow the wizard and transfer all data from the external disk to the console’s internal storage (you have the “Select All” check option.
Format the disk for PC use
Once you are sure all your data is safe and you will not lose anything (or if you know that data on disk will be lost), you will need to connect it to a Windows PC. At first the program will not see the disk, so we have to format it with a computer-friendly file system. To do this, right-click on the first button and select “Disk Management”.
Here you will see that there are two sections, the upper part with a list of storage devices connected to the PC, in the lower part to view the partition of each drive. You need to specify which of the following is related to the disk you connected, the one from the Xbox, click on it and click on “Initialize disk”.
Once the disk is started, we now have to format it with the file system that Windows detects. To do this, simply click on the black sections marked “Unallocated Space” with the mouse button and select the “Create simple volume” option. This will introduce a wizard that will guide us through the partition-building process, where you just have to make sure you use it NTFS file system.
Once that is complete, you can use the disk on any Windows PC as usual.