xbox help

[aznflip]

i have an xbox and it seems to be messing up latley
it would say the disk is dirty or damage and not let me load the game but i know for sure its not the game because i bought two new ones, sometimes when it would let me play in the middle of the game it would bring me back to the menu screen and say the disk is dirty or damgae again

how can i fix this problem??
i tried cleaning the laser with a dvd laser cleaner but that didnt work

do i have to buy a new xbox laser??
how much will that set me back
or can i get it repaired somewhere

[justincalgary]

you laser is fried and you have to buy a new one. xbox came out with 2 different ones, a samsung and a thompson. not sure which is which. I know the good on isn't a solid cd tray it has cut outs. The life span isn't that long anyways

[mushi_mushi]

As the above poster said the dirty disk error is a sign that your dvd drive is slowly dieing...you can call tech support and get send it to microsoft for repairs for about a $100 but in that case you better of getting a new console.

The other thing you can do is buy a dvd drive on ebay and open your xbox and switch the drive. Theres alot of tutorials on the net that walk you through this, if you comfortable with taking your computer apart and know what an IDE cable looks like this is the easy way out.

There are currently I think four different dvd drives for the xbox. Thompson is by far the worst. The others are samsung, hitatchi and philips (in relative order of best to worst)

A replacment drive from ebay will cost anything from 20 to no more then 70 (if u pay more then 70 for a samsung u are being ripped of) there are a couple of ppl on here with spare drives, you can post a thread in the marketplace, but might need someone to help you with the instalation.

so your options are:

1. send it to microsoft for repair
2. get a replacement drive and fix it yourself
3. sell it right now, before it totally craps out

hope that helps, just so you dont feel horrible alot of xbox's suffer from this problem so its not just you...

[aznflip]

hey thanks for the thread

[hedge]

I've had some success by pulling the drive out and cleaning the lens I think it's called ... anything glass, with some window cleaner.

There's also a way of doing a pot tweak but apparantly it will make the drive die even faster.

[aznflip]

oh really how do u upen the xbox i dont see any screws or anything

[heavyD]

Originally posted by justincalgary
you laser is fried and you have to buy a new one. xbox came out with 2 different ones, a samsung and a thompson. not sure which is which. I know the good on isn't a solid cd tray it has cut outs. The life span isn't that long anyways

There is actually 3 different drives (Thompson, Phillips, & Samsung). The Thompson ones are the ones that crap out the most by far. Phillips & Samsung drives are available on ebay for cheap and the swap is pretty simple. There is a link that I can't remember that shows how you can tell what drive you have from the differences in the tray. Do a google search and you'll probably find it.

[hedge]

Originally posted by aznflip
oh really how do u upen the xbox i dont see any screws or anything

The screws are under the footpads at each corner, there's also 2 more screws under the sitckers, you need a torx bit to remove them. (of course opening it voids your warranty)

You'll also need some different torx bits to get into the drive itself.

Another option is to mod it, put in a bigger hd and then rip your games to the hd (although you need a working drive, or another xbox to rip them)