I came home from work tonight to find that my daughter had left my xbox on with the entertainment center's door closed over the space my xbox was in. My machine will turn on but will not read my hard drive. It eventually displays the E68 error code on the screen. I've tried a few of the quick fixes suggested on the internet, but nothing is working. If I can't recover the hard drive, I'll literally have lost well over 100 hours of forge work on dozens of unfinished maps. Not to mention all my game saves since the 360 first came out. Someone tell me you know how to access this info and transfer it over to a new drive.
The internal drive may still be intact and it could be just the connection that's fried. I don't know how an xbox hard drive works, but I'm assuming it would be the same as a computer hard drive, in which case the data is still salvagable. If it's the internal part that is fried, well then... P.s: you can get tech experts to salavage what they can off broken hard drives but it's very expensive.
I'm not really sure what happened but basically I'm guessing the console overheated? Either way, you can contact microsoft and see what they recommend, or take it to a hardware store and see if they can do anything. It's looking pretty glum though... you could also try "sweating it out" by wrapping it in a jumper and leaving it running to re-solder the joints together.
I'd personally try the hard drive on another xbox...to see if it's the xbox or the hard drive itself. If it works on the new xbox....buy an arcade version and put in your hard drive...if not then like others have been saying you might have to have it salvaged by a professional.
A few notes on what I'm about to say : 1. Don't do this if you have another Xbox handy. Its kind've pointless, unless you want to create a back-up. 2. Using the program suggested will not cause M$ to freak out and ban your account. Unless you change something. 3. I am NOT responsible if you erase your drive. Hop on Ebay (or visit your local game retailer) and get a transfer cable if you don't already have one. Google Modio, or some other harddrive reading program (Modio is the easiest). Follow the instructions on how to open and access your harddrive. If Modio can see it, then the drive is ok, its your connection to the drive on the console. If you'd like to be double sure and safe about it, you can make a flash copy of your entire drive onto your computer so you can load them onto another drive later. I save a copy of my drive once in a while, just in case my xbox frags out and my drive fails. Its a safe back up system.