I want to know how many Xbox owners out there have trouble with the "Your disc is dirty or damaged" error.
It's happened ever since I got my system (2 years ago) on rare occasions. Sometimes the games would freeze and that damned message would pop up and I'd have to restart the game. I figured this was probably a rare glitch and it was not a reason to worry, but it's starting to piss me off lately.
I seems to happen fairly randomly, although in some games it happens consistently. Like in DOA3, it happens most often, and regularly, just before an ending scene loads after beating the game. In Metal Gear Solid Sons of Liberty, it's totally random. Halo, as I understand, is a DVD-based game and it has always worked flawlessly on my system.
The weird thing is that I take meticulous care of my games. I don't leave them in the disc tray. I don't leave them laying around on the carpet or laying on the TV. They're not scratched at all. I always carefully place them back in the box after playing a game. Fable is a brand new game for me, and I started getting these errors on the first night I played it. I've experienced it once or twice with Splinter Cell and never on most of my other games. Sometimes a game will freeze with no error.
I called 1-800-4my-Xbox, and did not get any explanation of what could be wrong (although I already knew it was either a dirty lens or a bad DVD drive, I was basically hoping they could recommend a cleaning kit to me) and was just told that Microsoft could fix this for $80, which seems very expensive, especially since I don't know what they intend to do for that $80. If they just clean the lens, I'm not spending that kind of money. I feel that it doesn't happen often enough for me to justify spending $80 to fix it. The way I describe this, you'd think it happens all the time, but really it is only once in a while. Some days I can play for hours without any problems. I'm not even sure that fixing it will totally eliminate the errors. If I spend that money, I want my Xbox to work perfectly.
I wanted to know what you all think of this problem and if you're experiencing it with your own Xbox. Is this just a hazard of being an Xbox owner, or is there something seriously wrong with my system? Do you think I just need to get a console cleaning disc, or do I need to actually replace the DVD drive? Has anyone had good luck with a cleaning kit? I would love to hear your recommendations.