Scratching Xbox 360?

Reproducing the problem

The scratches on the discs we received from compaining Xbox customers appeared in different places, so not just on the outsode or on the inside; this would indicate that one of the parts of the moving reading head is causing the problem. We have tried the Xbox in question both horizontally as vertically placed and used more than one disc, but we could not reproduce the scratching as long as the Xbox was placed on a solid surface. All our discs were read perfectly and came out without a scratch, even moving or nudgng the console lightly did not cause any scratching.

After this initial test we put several layers of tape on one side of a DVD-R disc, making this disc thicker and heavier on one side thus causing the complete console to go off balance. This would, according to the theory, cause the disc to touch parts of the DVD reader that it should not touch and cause scratching.

We created an unstable disc with sticky tape.

As we expected the disc caused the console to vibrate strongly, even the table we placed the console on started moving when we tried to play this disc. However, even with this unstable disc we could not get the same problem of disc scratching we have seen earlier, the disc played as normal and came out of the drive without any markings. We did find that an Xbox that is placed horizontally does not vibrate as much as one that is upright. This is easily explainable as the drive in the console can work both horizontal and vertically, however it does perform better and was primarily designed to be used in a horizontal position.

Deep scratches

Even with a highly unstable disc no sign of any markings so we decided to take things a bit further. When playing a disc we picked up the console and moved it quickly from vertical to horizontal and back. This caused a horrible scratching noise from the console and when opening the drive the disc showed clear round scratches. It is obviously not the way to handle your Xbox, and the manual even clearly states that the console should not be moved while in operation. This is a clear case of "Don't try this at home!".

To be able to see where the disc touches the actual drive works we colored a disc with black marker pen en played this disc while moving the Xbox. When we opened the drive again we could clearly see markings on the outer ring of the DVD tray, which is normal as this ring is meant to handle instabilities in DVD discs used.The outer rings of DVD's normally do not hold data anyway, so this would not cause major problems. On the rest of the tray we could not find any markings whatsoever, meaning that the tray was not responsible for the damage done to the discs.

Marked discs to show where the fault appears