DRE on 360?

[pinebarrens]

I opened my Brand New 360 a couple of days ago and start in on my Brand new copy of Gears of War and twice within 24 hours I've had problems with it reading discs. Do I need to worry about this or is this pretty common?

[jmiller80]

There was a problem with the first batch of GOW discs. I had the same problem -- DREs at specific points in single, co-op, and multiplayer. A friend about 100 miles away had the same problems a few days later, exchanged his disc and has been DRE-free also. The problems are noted on Epic and number of other gaming forums.

I just exchanged the disc at EB/GS (no questions asked) and have had no problems since.

[triforcer]

i bought my 360 3 weeks ago on that TRU deal and i had a disc read error day one playing rainbow six vegas. i chalked it up to it being not enough ventilation, so i opened the glass doors to my entertainment center. things worked fine after that first day, but i would get a DRE ever so often. it didn't bother me that much and it also happened when i started playing gears of war that i bought a week later. i didn't think much of it since it only happened about once or twice when i was playing GOW single player.

well two days ago i was playing vegas online and got disc read errors 3 times and 3 frozen screens in about 5 hour game session. this pretty much told me that this thing was gonna shit out on me sooner than later so i ended up exchanging it at TRU for another system the next day.

the manufacturing date of the first one was august '06, the new one i got is october '06 so i'm hoping this one is as reliable as my regular xbox which only had problems a handful of times. i'm really disappointed by the downgrade in quality from the original xbox.

my advice is hold on to your system for 2 or 3 weeks i try playing long sessions to see if the DRE occur more frequent. if it does exchange it for a new one where you bought it. at least that way you wont have to deal with sending it to customer service and get it fix, but after you exchange you pretty much have to deal with MS if anything comes up on the new one.

[Indiana]

Well if you have glass doors on your enterainment center shut your 360 is going to get toasted with no way to vent the hot air. I would put a thermometer in there to see the air temp if I were you. Mine hit 99 degrees last night and the front is wide open on my cabinet. I'm planning to install a fan in the back to provide additional cooling.

[jmiller80]

My GOW DREs occurred at very specific times (e.g., entering a specific room while in co-op or refreshing after a search for ranked matches). We worked around the co-op problem by having my character hang back while my friend cleared the room before I ran through the problem room. Eventually the DREs were too much to take, so I exchanged it and have had no problems since.

It is possible a contemporaneous patch fixed the problem, but because my friend had the same DREs the following week, I think it was a bad production run.

My 360 is well ventilated on an open-air glass TV stand from BB. It has at least 3" of clearance on all sides and >4" of top clearance. I haven't had DREs on any other discs.