360 hdd and disc read errors

[winds]

Hey guys,
I noticed over the last couple of weeks some of my games have been giving me "disc unreadable" errors. Some games take 7 or 8 tries to start reading properly, other games give it to me once in a while, and some games don't give me any problems at all. The games that do give me problems don't have any scratches, in fact some of them are brand new, and work perfectly in my friends console, so I knew it wasn't a problem with the discs.
I tried to clear the cache from my 20gb hdd but it didn't help. However, I tried to load the games with my hdd completely removed from the system and only the 256mb memory card in. This worked like a charm, the games that gave me problems before now work perfectly with only the memory card in the console. So I completely formatted my hdd and tried the games again, no luck, they refuse to work with the hdd in the console.

Has anyone experienced this? Is my hard drive completely useless/dying? It still works with most of my games, just a certain few it won't.

[Dylan]

Hm, are you getting "wrong region" errors as well? The exact same thing happened to one of my friends. If you've already cleared out your hdd and cleared the cache, it sounds like you might have to get it repaired. At least, that's what the microsoft support site says and what my friend ended up having to do.

[winds]

Hmm, I don't think it ever mentioned anything about wrong region. The only thing I noticed is disc unreadable and that I should clean the disc or contact microsoft support. It seems weird that a hard drive would cause a game to be unreadable, especially after formatting though, no? Maybe i'll try to format once more before deciding to buy another hdd. I'm assuming microsoft doesn't give any warranties on the hard drives? I bought it second hand.

[nickfil]

Hey guys,
I noticed over the last couple of weeks some of my games have been giving me "disc unreadable" errors. Some games take 7 or 8 tries to start reading properly, other games give it to me once in a while, and some games don't give me any problems at all. The games that do give me problems don't have any scratches, in fact some of them are brand new, and work perfectly in my friends console, so I knew it wasn't a problem with the discs.
I tried to clear the cache from my 20gb hdd but it didn't help. However, I tried to load the games with my hdd completely removed from the system and only the 256mb memory card in. This worked like a charm, the games that gave me problems before now work perfectly with only the memory card in the console. So I completely formatted my hdd and tried the games again, no luck, they refuse to work with the hdd in the console.

Has anyone experienced this? Is my hard drive completely useless/dying? It still works with most of my games, just a certain few it won't.

that is bizarre. I have a 360 that gaives the same errors, but I'm pretty sure it is a bad laser.

[Dylan]

Hmm, I don't think it ever mentioned anything about wrong region. The only thing I noticed is disc unreadable and that I should clean the disc or contact microsoft support. It seems weird that a hard drive would cause a game to be unreadable, especially after formatting though, no? Maybe i'll try to format once more before deciding to buy another hdd. I'm assuming microsoft doesn't give any warranties on the hard drives? I bought it second hand.

Interesting, those are the sort of errors you get when the discs are scratched, but as you've said that's not the case. If reformatting it doesn't work, then there's something physically wrong with it, and you're looking at a repair or replacement.

[winds]

Yeah I would have assumed it'd be the laser too. In fact I did, I called microsoft and requested a repair, they're sending me the box/shipping label now haha.

But just an update: I did some messing around with it and figured out that the hdd wasn't exactly in 100% correctly. I put it back in the correct way and it "seems" to be working fine now. I loaded the game that was giving me the most frequent errors, and it loaded fine 2 times without error. That seems fixed considering before the game wouldn't load at all until about the 7th or 8th try. I'll test it out again later though to make sure it's still working. If not i'll send it in for repairs.

[nickfil]

Yeah I would have assumed it'd be the laser too. In fact I did, I called microsoft and requested a repair, they're sending me the box/shipping label now haha.

But just an update: I did some messing around with it and figured out that the hdd wasn't exactly in 100% correctly. I put it back in the correct way and it "seems" to be working fine now. I loaded the game that was giving me the most frequent errors, and it loaded fine 2 times without error. That seems fixed considering before the game wouldn't load at all until about the 7th or 8th try. I'll test it out again later though to make sure it's still working. If not i'll send it in for repairs.

just out of curiosity- what did you do to solve the problem? How did you get the hdd up to snuff.

[winds]

Overall I ended up clearing the cache at first, then formatting the hard drive twice. Neither of those seemed to fix the problem at all though. Finally today I took the hard drive back out, cleaned the port a little bit with some good ol' fashion blowing , then used a bit of force re-connecting it until i heard it click into place.
Nothing too technical, but it seemed to have fixed it. I'll post again if that gives me anymore problems in the near future.

[Dylan]

Well, that was simpler than I thought. Glad to hear it's working alright now.