Journal

XBox help, anyone?

19 Comments

Okay, here’s the deal: our XBox is wonky to the point of nigh-uselessness, and I’ve got no idea how to take care of the problem.

Symptoms:
1) DVD playback is hit-and-miss, mostly hit. Sometimes, though, the machine won’t recognize DVDs. If you pause for more than a minute or two, you’ll have to reboot before being able to play again. If you pause and then frame-advance, and let it scroll at 1/4 or 1/8 speed, you can resume play just fine.

2) Lots of disk “scrubbing.” There are lots of times when I hear HD access scrubbing back and forth. Fable did this, and some DVDs do it.

3) DDR Playback often happens without the music, and the scrolling arrows seize up. As you might imagine, this is infuriating.

I suspect that this is happening because the hard drive is damaged. I also suspect that it would be cheaper for me to replace the XBox than to have it repaired. Coming up with the funds for this will be difficult regardless of which path we take, though, so the point may be moot.

So… anybody out there seen anything similar? I know, I know, Google is My Friend, and I could be looking this up myself, but I’ve got cartooning to do.

–Howard

19 thoughts on “XBox help, anyone?”

      1. Re: UPDATE

        No. They determined that it wasn’t a problem they could talk Howard through and they told us to mail it in. We weren’t really impressed with the customer support. They excelled at being appologetic, but not in problem solving.

        1. Re: UPDATE

          eeeww…. That’s support-speak for “something is getting replaced”.

          The $80 charge is *nasty*. I take it the thing is out of warranty?

          1. Re: UPDATE

            Actually, that reminds me of, “Well, our flow-list now says to say ‘we can’t help you anymore. Please send the unit to a real technician’…”

            But then I’m jaded toward phone-techs… (used to be one)

          2. I used to be one, too.

            I used to be a phone tech myself. We didn’t have one of those fancy “trees” though. We had to troubleshoot a dozen different products, interoperating on at least six different operating systems. But the principals of troubleshooting remain the same.

  2. Some older XBoxes have issues with bad DVD drives.

    And you’re right, replacing is generally going to be cheaper than repairing for any of the modern consoles. You might want to think about used (a pawn shop or some such is probably going to be cheaper than a game store)

  4. This is a froogle link to find DVD drives for Xbox.
    http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=replacement%20Xbox%20DVD%20drive%20-site%3Auk&num=20&hl=en&lr=&safe=active&sa=N&tab=wf

    Found this which might explain it. The link above has adjustment instructions which are…difficult. A new DVD can be had for 40ish?

    Microsoft’s been sued over the Xbox DVD drive, gotta love DRM.

    http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=129645&cid=10814846

    “” This is different. (Score:5, Informative)
    by Omni Magnus (645067) Alter Relationship on Sunday November 14, @04:39PM (#10814846)
    The original XBOX DVD drives have a very short lifespan. This is because M$ wanted them to ONLY read DVD-ROMs and CD-ROMs (probably to stop piracy with the system). That just wasnt possible, but they were able to suceed in not getting them to read almost all CD-R’s and most DVD-R’s. Now, because this laser is so finely tuned to read ONLY those types of media, when it goes through a few months of normal use that wouldn’t phase a normal drive, the XBOX drive is no longer able to read data. I think this decision will cost Microsoft dearly. All those XBOX owners with faulty drives arent going to want an XBOX2 as unreliable as the first one.””

    Some people go to extremes to replace them 😛
    http://evox.xboxhackz.net/evox/guides/dvd_drive_replacement.html

  5. Have you tried using a CD cleaner disc on the optical drive? Quite a few times the failure to play is the result of a dirty laser-lens…
    Not sure about the hard-drive unfortunitly.

    1. I think it does so itself if left to it’s own devices.

      I was having Morrowind GOTY load abnormally slowly on me (and believe me, you can’t help but notice that) with alot of HDD activity.

      So I decided to see what would happen if I ejected the disk and just let the Xbox sit tight for a couple of minutes. I did so, and the HDD remained somewhat active for a little while, then finally stopped. I re-inserted the Morrowind disk and resumed playing, this time with the more bearable normal loading speed.

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