Xbox 360 hard drive transfer kit

My son has a new Xbox 360 elite, having upgraded after his old console flaked out. He is still using the original 20 gig hard drive from the old console on the new elite. We just got the hard drive transfer kit today.

I've been reading the writeups on this, and I just wondered how the transfer would go and what would be transferred.

My son already has to be online to view some content because the previous console was a warranty replacement. He has purchased maps for one of his games from Xbox Live for one of his game, not sure if it was Halo or some other one. Would he still have to be online to have access to those after the hard drive content is transferred, or would he have access to those things offline? And what about game demos, such as Halo Wars, which has just been released recently? Do those get transferred? Or would they all have to be re-downloaded. (Something to consider, our internet connection is such that this is a time consuming process.)

If he decided not to do the transfer and just start up on the new hard drive, would he have to go through a process of 'recovering the gamer tag' with the new hard drive? And if he decided to use both hard drives (I realize you can only have one connected at a time), starting subsequent games on the new one and using the old one for games he had prior to this point, would the gamer tag be synced somehow when he signs onto Xbox Live?

Could he transfer game save files from the old hard drive to his memory card, remove the old hard drive, insert the new one, and then transfer that file from the memory card to the new hard drive?

We still haven't transferred the licenses to the new console. So far he hasn't really needed to.

Thanks, looking forward to hearing from someone who has used these items. (I don't, I'm just the technical adviser when need be. )

 

I haven't used the transfer kit myself, but this link might help answer some of your questions.

http://www.xbox.com/en-US/support/systemuse/xbox360/console/datamigration.htm

 

Thanks for your response.

Do you know anything about going back and forth between two hard drives and how that affects the gamer tag? There seems to be some status points a gamer achieves for getting to certain levels, and that affects how far a person can get in games, right? Or what levels a player has access to? So one would want the gamer tag to be up to date. That's why I was wondering if the info would somehow sync if a person signed onto Xbox Live, so a person's status would be up to date if they were switching between two different hard drives. (Again, I don't play...I'm just the 'technical support'. )

 

Gamers earn points for accomplishing tasks in games, and this information is sent to Microsoft as it gets updated as long as you're connected to the internet. The profile, as far as i can tell from my own experience, syncs with Microsoft almost instantly when a new achievement is unlocked, so as long as the Xbox connects to the Live service to sync the profile, or if you transfer the profile to the new hard drive with the transfer you'll be ok. Worst case scenario is that you have to retrieve your profile from Xbox Live. This process is very simple and takes about 10 minutes. Basically you're pulling all your profile information from the Microsoft servers onto your Xbox. So even if something goes very wrong, you won't lose all your profile information.

 

Ok, thanks!