Posted: 1/31/2009 12:47:02 PM EDT
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Son got Christmas money, enough for basic Xbox.
Dad (me) decided to help family by upgrading basic Xbox to Xbox elite. Son ageed to share Xbox with others in return for dad's financial upgrade. Basic X-box purchased two Fridays ago, return and upgrade took place the next day, two Saturdays ago. On return to home two Saturdays ago, county wide power failure preventd stup and testing, except for three successful rounds of Pac-man (built in game) play two Sundays ago. Dad knew quite a bit about computers and computer games ten years ago, has never seen an X box until two weekends ago. Dad is X-box clueless and the machine sat, unplugged and untouched until today when kids returned for another visit. Xbox errors out of most processing intensive games with error message: Cannot read disk, disc dirty, clean disk and try again", give or take. Specific failures include Call of Duty 4 and Midnight Club: Los Angeles. Midnight Club can be loaded onto the unit's internal hard drive, at which point, game play is successful. It only fails when trying to play the processing intensive game from the DVD drive. COD4 will not load to the internal hard drive, "dirty disk" message. Two other games play successfully from DVD drive, both are simple games, not 3D graphics intensive, those games are Lego:Iindiana Jones, and Kung Fu Panda. All four games are brand new, never been used or tried, unwrapped from factory shrinkwrap today. Clueless dad thinks we have a unit with a marginal DVD drive. My theory is that it reads fast enough to keep up with simple games but not well enough for games where the processor is right up against design limits. In the slower games the processor has time to say "Wait, didn't catch that, can you repeat it", to the DVD drive and the game is slow enough that the re-read does not interrupt game play. Faster games do not allow time for a re-read, and so halt play and display the above error message. For reasons unknown, the DVD can read the Midnight Club game well enough to copy the data to the internal drive where all works well, but the DVD drive cannot read the COD game well enough to copy to hard disk. We can play the COD4 game direct from DVD disk, normally about half the time. The other half, we get the "dirty disk" message and can only play COD4 by stopping "Auto-play", then trying again. No matter which way we start the game it always fails with the "dirty disk" message when we try to mov above the training level. Clueless Question 1. Is my theory right, do we most likely have a marginal DVD drive in this unit? If so, is there a fix, do we return the game to the place of purchase to exchange for another unit, or begin the service/support process and ship it off to the manufacturer fpr repair? (We have receipts and all original packing materials.) Clueless Question 2. If my theory is not correct, what might be the problem, how do we test to confirm, and what then is our best move? Clueless Question 3. How often does this happen? How many returns or repairs are we likely to face before acquiring a fully functional unit? Sorry if this is too much info, I am clueless and don't know what's important and what isn't. The kids are understandably frustrated at waiting so long after Chrstmas to enjoy their major acquisitions. We celebrated the holiday a bit early to fit into visitation schedules, today is six weeks since they "received" this present and it has yet to function as intended. Dad, not much of a video game guy, is not overly impressed with any part of the whole situation. Thanks for any help you can give. |
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Quoted:
do you have a laser lens cleaner? could be the problem. It looks like a regular cd, but has a little brush embedded in it. That or kids and their greasy fingers touching up the disc. I do not have a laser lens cleaner. Both the disks which trigger the error message and other problems appear spotless and have fully intact coatings, under magnification, as far as I can see. |
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My 360 has been having similar problems for the last year or so, unfortunately mine is long out of warranty but there is still hope for you.
I would take it back to the store you bought it from and exchange it for a new one. If that doesn't work it should be covered under warranty from Microsoft, but you will have to send it away for 6-8 weeks to get it repaired, so I would try the store first. |