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[arikmoon]

Hey all, I was wondering if you could provide some info on this situation.

Let me start by saying I have the Hitachi DVD drive and a mfg. date of 5/2006.


Recently, my friend let me borrow his copy of Perfect Dark Zero.  Tossed the disc in, tried it out for 20 min, then left it alone for weeks.

Played GOW, PGR3, Halo2, etc... and all seemed to play normally.

Decided to pop PDZ back in to play after weeks on the shelf, and while it was reading the disc and right before it jumped into the M$ logo, the 360 hung.  I tried messing with the buttons on the controler, ejecting the disc, no luck; so I rebooted.

Upon reboot, I think I saw the splash screen (maybe not), but it hung again (mind you, the PDZ disc is still in).  Both times it hung though, I heard some really bad seeking/reading noises from the DVD drive.  Spin, click, spin, click, spin, click.  Eventually, after a few rounds of this, I ejected the disc and rebooted the system without the disc.  Instant bootup, no problems.

Popped other games in, no problem, they played as suspected.  

So I'm looking at the PDZ disc looking for the problem...There were a couple of scratches, but nothing too bad, but I resurfaced the disc anyway with my resurfacer.  Now there are no scratches, I put the disc back in, and presto, it works.

So I chalk it up to a tiny scratch in the wrong place, problem fixed?  So I play the game for a couple hours,  shut down the system, turn it back on, and it hangs again.  Lots of clicking, lots of reboots, same problem.  Now I know it can't be the scratches.

I take the disc out this time and under some REAL bright light look for some clues.  Thats when I saw the hairline crack in the TOP of the disc, not the bottom where the laser reads data, but the top by the label.  First thing that goes through my head is "great, now I get to buy PDZ for my friend because I don't want him thinking I trashed his disc."  So I gently applied a little backwards pressure to the disc, got to see the wafer of foil containing the data turn funny colors because of the pressure, and I tried to play it again.  

Belive it or not, it played.  Basically I went through this manipulation of the disc and many restarts, AND LOTS OF DVD READING NOISE, for many days while I completed the game.

Now maybe I'm paranoid, but when I play other discs, I hear the same clicking, discs seem to take a little longer to read, and sometimes in games like GOW and PGR, texture loading seems a little slower than it used to.

My question is, have I possibly scratched the lens to the DVD drive when I was getting PDZ to play?  Is it even possible for the lens to extend up far enough to make contact with a spinning disc?

I haven't moved the console since I bought it a couple of months ago.

PDZ is finally rendered useless, it no longer plays in my system no matter how much I try to smooth out the crack in it.

Thanks for the info guys.

[arikmoon]

bump

[RDC]

There's no way for the lens to extend up that far and hit the disc.

Texture loading takes awhile in GoW I've noticed on a couple different 360s, so no biggie there really.

You're probably just accustomed to hearing the DVD drive seeking now, kinda like when you drive a certain car you notice that there are more of them around, but there really isn't.

It's possible the laser is on it's way out and reading that cracked disc over and over put more of a strain on it. If it IS making a somewhat disturbingly loud clicking sound, listen to a friends 360 with the same drive type and use the same game if you can, compare how they sound. That's not an exact way of telling what shape the drive is in though, yours may just need a good cleaning too, so give that a shot before anything more drastic.

This post has been edited by RDC: Jan 9 2007, 04:01 PM

[Safrole]

When I've had a laser (in black boxes) that's close to its death, it will make multiple attempts to read the TOC.  So instead of hearing it exercise its axis just one time, you hear it multiple times as it repeats its homing routine.  This clicks in your brain as some sort of severe mechanical failure.

Theory - that the PDZ disk is more difficult for your borderline drive because of its minor imperfections.  I would return that shakey disc to your friend before you have to buy it, and get your drive key soon in case you have to replace more than just your laser. (provided you're out of warranty)

[arikmoon]

Thanks for the responses.

QUOTE(RDC @ Jan 9 2007, 09:30 AM)

There's no way for the lens to extend up that far and hit the disc.

That's delicious news.  I thought that to be the case, but I didn't know if that 1mm clearance would be compromised with a cracked disc.


Yea, GOW sure does take a while to load textures.  I'm noticing it even more now that I've been playing a lot of multiplayer and trying to host a few games.  As soon as I host, the game enters the lobby, shows a 3d birds-eye of the map, and then items start to texture one at a time, and I definitely hear the dvd being read.

Perhaps I'm confusing a feature with a problem though.  The game does enter that lobby VERY fast, and then worries about loading up the textures.  Maybe that's by design so as to not have long load times to load all the textures, and then enter the lobby.


I am still under warranty for quite a while, so I'll just have to see what happens.  Hopefully it dies right around the time they're replacing the mobo's with the 65nm process and they give me a new one.

Thanks for the info.