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XBOX 360 Your disc is dirty and cannot be read
bigpanda
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I've been getting this error for the last couple months but am just now contacting MSFT to get it fixed as it seems to be getting worse the last month or so. Unfortunately it's passed the original warranty and they want something like $100 to send it in but I'm having a hard time figuring out if it's the hard drive or the disc drive that's the problem.
It's very sporadic and I haven't been able to get it to repeat without the hard drive yet but since MSFT won't replace the hard drive I don't want to pay the money to send it only to have nothing fixed and then have to buy the hard drive on top of that.
Has anyone with that error ever had it fixed by replacing the hard drive or should I just send the system to MSFT?
I would just ditch it at this point if I didn't have so much money invested in Rock Band download content.
It's very sporadic and I haven't been able to get it to repeat without the hard drive yet but since MSFT won't replace the hard drive I don't want to pay the money to send it only to have nothing fixed and then have to buy the hard drive on top of that.
Has anyone with that error ever had it fixed by replacing the hard drive or should I just send the system to MSFT?
I would just ditch it at this point if I didn't have so much money invested in Rock Band download content.
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Do you see this on all your discs, or just one/a few?
The ones that it happens most with are Marvel Ultimate Alliance Gold, Gears of War, Grand Theft Auto IV.
It happens with Rock Band and Guitar Hero occasionally, but the ones above seem to be more frequent.
I'm going to try Marvel this week to try and replicate the problem. It's odd, but it seems like it happens more frequently the further you get in these games. Not sure if that might have something to do with the laser having a harder time reading the disc at certain points. GTAIV without the HDD plugged in is really tough to replicate especially since a lot of the map isn't unlocked so it's tough to get a car and get up to speed to try and get it to freeze.
It seems like the drive is dying a slow death then since it's been doing it not long after I bought the system in January 07. Back then it was once in about 12 sessions with Gears, then around April/May I got Marvel UA and it started doing it about 1/3 of the time I played that game and eventually progressed to about 98% of the time with that disc. Guitar Hero is about 1/30 of the time and Rock Band is about 1/8 of the time. GTAIV is about 3/4 of the time but it's always been with the later missions. The beginning of the game it would happen very rarely and now that I'm about 85% of the way through the story it's been happening a lot more.
Part of me is just considering getting an Elite for the extra drive space. If I went that route, anyone know if I'd have a problem getting my download content to work on it the same as with the Premium system that I have now? If so, would getting a data transfer cable help?
Thanks,
BP
How long have you had your console? Does the problem occur while playing a game, or only on the initial boot? Does this get in the way of playing games or is it an annoying and worrisome inconvenience?
My 360 has recently developed two strange quirks, the first being that the motor used to open and close the tray seems to be slowly giving up its will to live. The second, and more concerning, is that it has decided not to read my external drive only to have me give up in frustration and return to find the problem mysteriously fixed after walking away for a few hours.
If I were you I'd take the time to pinpoint if this can be replicated with any certainty. If you can recreate the problem you'll have a much better idea of how it can be fixed. And if a RRoD is around the corner, it behooves you to give it a few weeks before shelling out cash for a fix.
yeah, i know that this is not very kosher, but with a console so defective by design i tend to overlook my morals
luckily, my 360 has been flawless, but every single one of my friends got RROD, DVD-Rom failure (which is what you're getting), or a fan failure on theirs
It's definitely something that impacts the games during playing. I've learned to save early and save often when playing anything. The funny thing is that when I was on my Marvel UA obsession I'd game hardcore for like 8-12 hours with that one at first, but as the game progressed and the DRE's became much more common it became almost a timer. It was like, Ok, time for some MUA; I'll play til I DRE then it's time to do some laundry.
With GTAIV it's a lot more frustrating because it can happen almost at any point. I've had it DRE on the title screen, when walking out of the last save point, but most often when in a high speed chase with 3 stars or more since there's so much going on that it needs to account for and load.
With GTAIV you can kind of watch for it since the redraw will disappear or the sound will drop out. If you pause the game there's a 50/50 chance that it will allow the system to catch up. Thing is that I'm not sure if it's caching to the hard drive and the latency is with the HDD or the DVD-ROM.
I'm trying to trouble shoot that now, I cleared the cache with MSFT on the phone but yesterday it froze again with the HDD plugged in. I popped it off and started playing again and haven't been able to replicate it yet. That doesn't necessarily mean that it's the DVD-ROM though since sometimes I can get a long session out of GTAIV without problems. Once you throw in the fact that this seems to occur at a certain point in most games I wonder if the ROM is having a problem reading things on the outer edge of the disc or the inner edge.
As I type this I'm wondering if there might be a slight wobble in the spindle where it would be more pronounced at the edge of the disc than the inner areas. Just a theory.
I just bought a PS3 this week because I wanted to get Soul Calibur and Force Unleashed and didn't want to have to deal with this shit on the XBOX. I'd switch completely except I've got a couple friends back in Michigan that I play with through Live and I've got a couple hundred dollars invested in down load content for Rock Band among other games through Live.
I will say though that after this, I'll be recommending the PS3 over the XBOX to anyone that asks my opinion on what to buy. I'm really really really really really pissed off at Microsoft right now for shipping consoles that are destined to break like this.
Once the next round of systems come out, while I probably won't be an early adopter, it will be a damn hard sell for me to even look at Microsoft's offerings. I should have known better than to buy a system from a software company that believes in releasing broken or faulty software and feels like they can just "patch it later". At least Sony is a HW company that has more experience in this arena. That's not to say that they don't have their problems, hell look at the XBR LCD television issues they have with the clouding problems, but the PS3 wasn't knowingly released with such shoddy components and a lack of testing so that it would most likely fail within two years.
Microsoft really should have expanded that 3 year warranty to include the DRE errors.