I have a 250GB Western Digital passport hard drive and it works great. But when i try to transfer a large file like 4 or 5gb such as an mkv video its saying that there isn't enough space on the hard drive when theres 160gb of free space left. Can someone explain to me why. Thanks.

Since your drive (http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=317&language=en) is cross compatible with a Mac that probably means it came pre-formatted as FAT. The maximum file size that FAT can normally handle is 2GB; 4GB on some systems. You would need to format it (or part of it) as NTFS in order to support very large file sizes.

I use my drive to play videos on my 360 and if i format it will it no longer be able to read the NTFS format? How do i format it so i can store large files on my harddrive and still watch movies or play music on my 360. Say if i wanted to format 200 gb for NTFS and 50 gb for FAT.

Utilities such as BiNG (in my sig) or a GParted Live CD (http://gparted-livecd.tuxfamily.org/) can partition or resize and repartition your hard drive any way you want it. So you would first need to either wipe everything off the drive and make your FAT partition from scratch or else resize the FAT partition down to the size you want it. Such non-destructive resizing is not without risk to data so backup any such vital data beforehand. Then attach the drive to a Win2K/XP/Vista machine and use its disk management to create and format the NTFS partition in the available but, as of yet, unallocated space.

The Xbox, as you have surmised, only reads FAT on USB drives. Whether having more than one partition would create any problems for it, I haven't yet been able to determine. If you know or find out the answer by trial and error - it would be nice if you could post back and let us know.

So i tried running two partitions on the hard drive and i was not able to format it correctly and would not play videos on xbox so i just formatted the entire hard drive to NTFS. But i could have been doing something wrong. Anyways thanks for your guys' help.

so i just formatted the entire hard drive to NTFSFor XBox it must be FAT. Since NT-based Windows Disk Management can only format FAT32 partitions up to 32GB you must use a third-party utility, such as the two already mentioned, if you want partitions beween 32 and 2000 GB. Above 2000 GB (or 2TB) it is only theoretically possible to go up to the maximum of 8TB when using 32KB clusters.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/314463

Hmm... so is the xbox pretty good video quality, dpt206? what formats of videos plays it?

Partition Magic is a good program to use and it's really fast and easy to use. And for Alternate's question, the xbox video quality is good, and it plays wmv, mp4. and divx videos or avi format. Since i mostly have avi, its looks decent. Because i have it playing on a 65" 1080p, the movie looks a bit stretched out but still really good.