I fired up the old 360 on Saturday night play a few rounds of Halo 3 and was greeted by a nice series of grinding noises as the optical drive spun up. Once the game had loaded, the noise stopped, so I joined up with some friends for some Team Slayer ranked matches. We were totally rolling. During the final match, though, a loud, constant buzzing started up, but I was able to finish the match and decided to wait until morning to figure out what to do.
On Sunday morning, I started the Xbox back up and the same grinding noises were there. Knowing that the customer support guy would have me swap out a few discs to make sure it wasn’t limited to Halo 3, I threw in a different disc. The tray immediately ejected. I tried it with several others, and the 360 kept on spitting them back out immediately. It was time to call customer support.
Mohammed was nice, though he stumbled over his script in a few places. He had me try to close the drive tray without a disc in it, and it stayed shut. I put Halo 3 back in, and this time it didn’t spit it back out, so that was good. It did make some grinding noises, and chirped and buzzed like last time my optical drive died. The game didn’t start up and the Xbox dashboard said “Unreadable disc.” Three other discs had the same result.
Says Mohammed, “You’re still under warranty. Do you want me to submit a repair order?”
“Please do,” I replied.
So, I’ll get a return box in 5 to 7 business days and then get a working Xbox back within three weeks. I’m hoping I’ll get one with the new chipset or at least the latest model optical drives. In the meantime, I guess I’ll have time to work on my novel.
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