So I was playing Call of Duty: Black Ops multiplayer yesterday and was getting bored so i decided i was going to go play zombies with my friend. I backed out of the online and went to the main menu to switch to zombie mode and before I could even get there i got the "can't read you disc error."
I tried restarting the xbox, opening the tray and closing it and that was not working and I was sure there was nothing wrong with the disc because I keep mine in their cases and out of the way and do my best to never get a scratch on them myself. I checked anyways though and I saw nothing. Then I proceeded to try again to no avail.
Just as the error message said I then went to xbox.com/support to look for a potential fix. Restart game, take disc out clean with dry cloth (which actually put a ring of tiny little scratches on the disc that were not there before but definitely don't effect the game, thanks for that tip though ;D), take out harddrive, clear system cache. None of this worked. Then I got to trying another game. Alright, I'll give it a shot. Popped in some 2k11 and what do you know, it works. There's a catch 22 for ya. My system is broken but my black ops clearly has something wrong with it that my system caused and my warranty has been up for upwards of 2 years now. Bittersweet.
I figured I would just leave it be for the time being and played 2k for a little bit then turned my system off for the night.
Next day, Today, I go to see if maybe I can find the root of the problem. Since the warranty ran out long ago and my xbox isn't worth sending in to be fixed I had no reason to fear my warranty being void because the lack thereof so I decided to open it up and see if there was anything I could see was wrong with even with my lack of electronic knowledge. Or at the very least clean out some of the dust that might be in the fans and around the lens.
Opened it up and yes there was dust but nothing excessive. Lens seemed fine and don't wanna touch that because those are fragile. Just went to grab Black Ops to see if it might work now after the small dust busting job I just did. Took it out of the case and give it one more inspection and notice there's a small crack by the center of the disc. And I'm sitting here thinking "Noooo way. That wasn't there last night and definitely wasn't there before that."
This is where google can be very helpful. Search, xbox cracks my discs. Oh hey. The first result looks promising to help find the culprit. I read that and take a look at the pictures provided. Look at my disc. Hmmm. the crack looks eerily similar and ok, i see 2 more on the disc now that I really know where to look.
I wouldn't mind as much either if I was sure that my xbox wouldn't do this to my other games. But we will see if I can be helped with this either on here or through 1-800-4MY-XBOX, though I doubt very much either will really help me at all