Xbox refusing to read discs, anyone?

[mats_j]

I've had my Xbox for about a year and a half, and now, all of a sudden, it's giving me a hard time. It tells me that my discs is scratched or dirty, which is absolute bollocks. It even told me this when I played Ninja Gaiden for the first time, fresh out of the wrapper. The thing is, like most people here, I'm extremely careful when handling my discs, and I vacuum my gaming setup regularly. So I can't imagine that I did anything to cause this.

I looked around on the net and found that a lot of people seem to have the same problem (I even found a petition against Microsoft on the subject), but few seem to know what to actually do. Some say that you should try a DVD-cleaner disc, other claim you can fix it by erasing your saves from the hard drive.

So, since this is such an enlighted forum, I'm just wondering if anyone here has the same problem, and/or knows what to do about it...

[Concept]

I get the same exact problem from time to time. I usually just have to rest and it loads fine afterwards though.

The biggest problem I get is with DVDs on the Xbox, which is ironic considering the PS2 is supposed to be vastly more unreliable when it comes to DVD playback, when it's proved to be the reverse.

[mats_j]

Don't even get me started on trying to get a DVD movie to run. I have to open and close the tray and fiddle with the on/off switch for 10 minutes...

[EvilBoris]

The very early xboxes all seem to have this trouble after a while, I'm not sure of a fix for it.

[Strider]

Any other games apart from Gaiden?

There's been a lot of problems with Gaqiden and Rallisport 2 because they're duel layered DVDs

[tyler]

I get problems all the time with ALL games. Its random, they usually work as soon as I reboot though. Thompson drive...

Its nothing to do with the discs its the dvd drive.

Though I've actually had the error message when running games from the HDD (but much less frequent) so...

EDIT: and I've never had a single problem with a dvd movie, just games.

[probeater]

Sounds like your lasers on the way out, you could trying tweaking the pot although this will invalidate your warrenty. You could probably get a samsung dvd drive for around ?50 which will read anything, or try selling your xbox on ebay, you could probably get around ?50-60 for it if you broke it in to bits ie, sell the psu for ?10-15, mobo and hardrive for ?40, case for ?10, broken dvd drive for ?10. Then buy a new xbox that has a samsung drive as they are far more reliable and will read basiclly anything.

[Sega Ages]

I know someone who recently had this exact same problem with PAL Ninja Gaiden on his Xbox. Brand new PAL Ninja Gaiden and it would randomly crash every few minutes during play with a disc read error. When he returned the game to the store, they told him that LOTS of people have been having problems with PAL Ninja Gaiden and returning them to the store, so they gave his money back...

Like someone else said, your Xbox is probably OK for most games except a few like NG which are known to cause problems for some reason

[Commander Marklar]

Thompson drive...

That's the problem, get it replaced. Go on eBay and pick up a cheap drive [that isn't a Thompson] and you problems will go away (best). If it is under warrenty, MS will do it for you (or send it back to the store and get a new one), possible another Thompson.