Why... If someone could just tell me why....

Games Other Halo
1

To those who know the pain…

It was Christmas and Walmart was all out of their 250GB models. But, perhaps to my misfortune, there was still a 4GB Xbox slim left! It was bought, given to me as a gift, and I tried to play Halo 3 coop with my friend who had his. But what was I greeted with? “One or more players does not have a Xbox 360 hard drive.” (or something along those lines) At first, I did not like it, but I reasoned that perhaps the game was just built to run off a hard drive or there was just another reason that was way over my head. I accepted it. When I had gotten Halo Reach, I tried to play coop again, however, I was greeted with the same message as I had been with Halo 3. Understandably, I was annoyed. I grew curious, and decided to investigate this issue further online. Upon googling “xbox 4GB halo problems,” I found many and any articles that were made in regards to what seemed a very common problem specific to those who bought a 4GB console. After searching around a bit, I drew the conclusion that I needed more space on my console.

So, I bought a memory stick worth 8GB of space for a cheap price to supplement the existing 4GB. Did this solve the problem? Sadly, no.

But… why?

Upon researching more, I found that there didn’t really appear to be any satisfactory answer ANYWHERE on the internet. But, there was still a sense of hope in me. I read articles telling of how people had conveyed this issue to Microsoft and that they were hard at work fixing the problem, for what ever technical reason their was.

As I later realized, practically all of the articles I had read on the subject dated back to 2010. That was 2… damn… years… ago… and today, there is nothing… NOTHING to be heard of it.

And so now I come here, asking this community why… why have they abandoned us? Why does the addition of a memory stick not fix the need for more space? Why EXACTLY does the game demand a hard drive to function only certain gamemodes? These are my questions. I ask that the answer is not inflicted with the bias of unconfirmed information, product of conspiratorial conjecture. I only wish to know these two things… the truth here and now.

  1. Why the hard drive is needed exactly.
  2. Why had Microsoft abandoned efforts to fix it.

Then… I will die happy.
But then again, so what? I’m just a minority… and though there are people in the world that play oblivious to the few unfortunates, there may be some “who walk away from Omelas…”

2
  1. Unknown, it was fixed in Halo: Reach with the Title Update.
  2. It is up to the game developers to fix it, in this case, Bungie had four years to fix it and 343i are not focusing on Halo 3 any more.
3

I agree with you the same happened to me when I tried to join a friend on halo 3 co.op campaign last week. I was so looking forward to going through it again before halo 4 but it wasnt to be.
Im not sure but I dont see why the server cannot detect a hdd even if it is 4gb and why that isnt enough for a co.op game I have no idea.
All I will say is that I doubt substituting it with a usb stick device would make any difference, Im sure the console would save to either but not to both at the same time, meaning that using an extra memory space wouldnt increase your hdd size.

4

The 4G slim does not have a hdd. It is flash memory. Same with the stick. It’s not a hdd. The best thing to do is get an older Xbox hdd external. Like the original 360 hdd. Take it completely apart and you have a Sata hdd. The new slim 4G has a Sata slot on the side panel. Just have to slide it in, there is no bracket.

5

> The 4G slim does not have a hdd. It is flash memory. Same with the stick. It’s not a hdd. The best thing to do is get an older Xbox hdd external. Like the original 360 hdd. Take it completely apart and you have a Sata hdd. The new slim 4G has a Sata slot on the side panel. Just have to slide it in, there is no bracket.

But according to Little Moa, the fact that it is internal and not hdd is not the problem, but is just instead a compatibility error which can by all means be fixed so that the game engine recognizes and works with the 4GB or even sticks, because the problem has been in fact fixed in Reach when it had been previously present.

I feel much better it has been fixed in Reach, though it did take them an unreasonably large amount of time for such a successful company… But if it can be fixed in Reach then why not Halo 3? It can and must be fixed for that game!

6

I had the same problem when I got my 360. I got the Kinect bundle withough a HDD and wasnt able to save videos to theater or anything. I think the reason has something to do with the game saves that have to be stored on both peoples HDD to have checkpoints in Campaign or something. Really the only fix is to get a HDD, they are a bit expensive so try to find a used or refurbished 250GB or one from the original 360.

7

> > The 4G slim does not have a hdd. It is flash memory. Same with the stick. It’s not a hdd. The best thing to do is get an older Xbox hdd external. Like the original 360 hdd. Take it completely apart and you have a Sata hdd. The new slim 4G has a Sata slot on the side panel. Just have to slide it in, there is no bracket.
>
> But according to Little Moa, the fact that it is internal and not hdd is not the problem, but is just instead a compatibility error which can by all means be fixed so that the game engine recognizes and works with the 4GB or even sticks, because the problem has been in fact fixed in Reach when it had been previously present.
>
> I feel much better it has been fixed in Reach, though it did take them an unreasonably large amount of time for such a successful company… But if it can be fixed in Reach then why not Halo 3? It can and must be fixed for that game!

Like I said in my post, it was up to Bungie to fix it in Halo 3, they never did and Halo 3 isn’t a primary focus for 343i.

8

> > The 4G slim does not have a hdd. It is flash memory. Same with the stick. It’s not a hdd. The best thing to do is get an older Xbox hdd external. Like the original 360 hdd. Take it completely apart and you have a Sata hdd. The new slim 4G has a Sata slot on the side panel. Just have to slide it in, there is no bracket.
>
> But according to Little Moa, the fact that it is internal and not hdd is not the problem, but is just instead a compatibility error which can by all means be fixed so that the game engine recognizes and works with the 4GB or even sticks, because the problem has been in fact fixed in Reach when it had been previously present.
>
> I feel much better it has been fixed in Reach, though it did take them an unreasonably large amount of time for such a successful company… But if it can be fixed in Reach then why not Halo 3? It can and must be fixed for that game!

No. Halo 3 was released before the Slims came out. The problem DOES arise because of the HDD issue. The 4GB Slims have Flash Memory. USB devices weren’t able to be used for storage at the time either, which is why it won’t work for Halo 3. They fixed that issue for Reach, but not 3.

Like it was stated, you can take apart an original 360 HDD and it slides right into the slims SATA slot in the side of the system. You…may want to rig up a supportive case for the drive so it’s not just “hanging” inside the system. It may damage the drive and/or port. But it DOES solve the issue because a HDD is in the system.