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Microsoft really wants you to upgrade your Xbox 360. It seems like a newer, higher-capacity console is always coming out, and with the notorious failure rates of the older systems, upgrading is a sensible thing to do.
Well, if you're moving from an older-model 360 with an external hard drive to the slim, you will have to transfer your data. Microsoft makes this process relatively painless, especially if you have a single profile on your console. All you have to do is attach the old hard drive to the new console via a proprietary cable, and when the data change is done, go online and enable content licenses on your system.
But what Microsoft doesn't go out of it's way to tell you is how messy content transfers get when you have two or more profiles on your console.
The new controller-based version of Rock Band called Rock Band Blitz came out on Xbox Live last week. My fiancé and I have hundreds of DLC songs for the original games but sadly most of our instruments are broken. Blitz offers a great way to get back in touch with the songs we spent lots of money on.
Well … for him, anyway. When the slim 360s came out, we upgraded from the original 20 GB model. When we did that, 90 percent of our Rock Band DLC ( and all of our Game Room content) stopped working on my account, and I couldn't find a fix online.
In a desperate moment when I just wanted to play through The Pixies album Doolittle, I discovered that all the content downloads ever made on the console were actually viewable from my fiancé's profile.
So, if you've annoyingly lost access to a lot of content thanks to a system transfer, read on. It's a very simple process, but very time-consuming. Unfortunately, you'll have to rely on my descriptions as I cannot show you pictures of my Xbox dashboard right now, for … embargoed reasons.
1) Locate your account menu
Log into your primary profile, or the one you did most of your downloading from before the system transfer. If you go all the way to the left, you'll come to a screen showing icons for various settings. If you have the current dashboard, you'll see a little box in the bottom left-hand corner called "Account." Click on that, yo.
2) Download history
From the Account menu you'll see "Download History." If you click on that, you'll have access to everything downloaded on the system from that profile.
3) Re-download content that isn't working
Now, you aren't really re-downloading anything, but you have to make the 360 think you are. Scroll through this list and if you've encountered any content that won't load properly or work at all, just click and go through the motions of downloading it. It will take a couple of seconds per item. Just hope that you bought a lot of Rock Band content packs rather than individual songs, otherwise you'll be doing this for a long time.
4) Test it
I've had excellent results with this method and now all the Game Room content I wanted to play works and I can play through Doolittle anytime I want to. Enjoy it. You just did something Microsoft should do automatically when you set up your content license on your new console.