I think my DVD drive is shot but just to make sure...
Do backups degrade over the course of a few weeks? Back in January, I managed to get my 360 working with my backups, played just fine for all of winter break. Went back to school for a couple weeks and now I'm home on spring break. The console won't read the disc (gives me that "disc could not be read" message that advises cleaning the disc or restarting the console), which is odd since the only thing that happened to the console in the interim was it was put in a cabinet. The disc surface is pristine, no scratches, no fingerprints, nothing, and the dye layer looks to be consistent, with no dark spots or streaks. As far as I can tell, this backup should still play.
I played with the trim pot levels a bit; turning the laser pot out to 3.6 k renders the drive completely unable to even read the disc, it thinks there's nothing in there. Turning the pot down seems to help, but I dropped it down to 2.7 k and it's still not reading (the screen fades to black, stays black for a few seconds and then the error message comes up). This console was plagued with read errors even before I flashed it, I was also having issues with textures popping in and whatnot when the game actually worked (this was an OEM disc that lived in the console, which was never dropped or disturbed while running). THAT disc eventually developed a hairline crack due to manufacturing error, which led to me flashing the console when I was refused a refund, but anyway... Am I right in assuming that I probably need a new laser diode or something else in the drive has gone wrong?
Do backups degrade over the course of a few weeks? Back in January, I managed to get my 360 working with my backups, played just fine for all of winter break. Went back to school for a couple weeks and now I'm home on spring break. The console won't read the disc (gives me that "disc could not be read" message that advises cleaning the disc or restarting the console), which is odd since the only thing that happened to the console in the interim was it was put in a cabinet. The disc surface is pristine, no scratches, no fingerprints, nothing, and the dye layer looks to be consistent, with no dark spots or streaks. As far as I can tell, this backup should still play.
I played with the trim pot levels a bit; turning the laser pot out to 3.6 k renders the drive completely unable to even read the disc, it thinks there's nothing in there. Turning the pot down seems to help, but I dropped it down to 2.7 k and it's still not reading (the screen fades to black, stays black for a few seconds and then the error message comes up). This console was plagued with read errors even before I flashed it, I was also having issues with textures popping in and whatnot when the game actually worked (this was an OEM disc that lived in the console, which was never dropped or disturbed while running). THAT disc eventually developed a hairline crack due to manufacturing error, which led to me flashing the console when I was refused a refund, but anyway... Am I right in assuming that I probably need a new laser diode or something else in the drive has gone wrong?
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It is probably the laser, as if it was a firmware problem, the drive wont work with retail discs either.