Is Halo 3 suffering from disc read error syndrome?

The first time I ran my disc after the update it came up with the screen you get tryin to play a 360 game on an Xbox, sayin you need to play this on a 360.. Umm yeah.. A reboot and all was fine..

But every so often when I leave a disc in the drive it will fail to start, I eject it and pop it back in and its fine.. But its only when I had the disc in it when I turned it on, and once when I used eject to turn on and put in a disc while it was booting..

I've been getting freezing in the menu's during multiplayer. I've even changed the disc with another one and the same problem occurs... I'm not even getting a disc read error, my console just freezes. I called MS and they were no help... hopefully there is a fix for this soon because Halo 3 is definately an amazing game, and I wanna keep playing multiplayer without the freezing...

All my Legendaries are fine. Completed Campaign, played most the the MP maps and modes, and watched all the bonus without a problem. However what you describe is a similar issue that PDZ had, mine, and others, perfectly undamaged PDZ, would just get read errors, it is supposedly something to do with the 360 only certain batches are affected, that to me doesn't seem right, but that is the theory on the interwebs.

And the freezing problem, I get that with RB6:V and CoD3 from time to time, just needs a reboot, but it largely happens when people are glitching on live, the 360 gets confused.

Anyone also noticed that on the last level of Halo 3, you can pass through rubble, I passed through atleast 10 pieces, I mean really huge pieces, something wrong with the Collision detection.

Some people are mentioning title updates. My Halo 3 hasn't had one, am I miss reading comments or should I have been asked to update. I have played on Live, so it doesn't think it needs one.

@MrZ
" I managed to make it work that one day by starting a couple other games first Blazing Angels 2 (which had always worked before but stopped after the problems with Halo) and Call of Duty 3. "

These are the exact symptoms that I had before my optical drive failed. It's probably your drive and not Halo 3.

If I'm right, soon all your games will begin to encounter disc read errors.

This just reinforces my earlier assertion that the majority of these reports are typical failures of the optical drive rather than a problem with Halo 3 itself.

Man this is PITIFUL.

And what's more pitiful is you guys keep bending over and taking it.

God, it is good to hear this is a problem that other people are having(is that sad??). My buddy brought his Collectors Ed. game over, and while it did have a few scratches, it should have been totally playable. It isn't. I couldn't even start the campaign. As soon as Master C. sees the Arbiter, disk error pops up. Playing online is a crap shoot, sometimes it works, sometimes it just doesn't.

@mmeyer xboxes red ring all the time when people play new games. look in a new game forum around launch. you'll always see a few people saying "zomg this game red-ringed my xbox". it's just a coincidence.

normal failure rates, people. add in a game that is being played by millions and of course you're gunna see a few cracked eggs.

@xenocidic..."This just reinforces my earlier assertion that the majority of these reports are typical failures of the optical drive rather than a problem with Halo 3 itself."

The majority of people on the xbox forum thread of this issue are getting errors with Halo3 but their other games play fine. This is anything but typical. I played Halo3 3hrs. straight last night (no problem), but I soon as I load the last level I get the disc error. What does that tell you? Bad Disc...maybe. Now check this out. My friend felt so bad 4 me that he lent me his copy of Halo3 to see if it works. He had finished the campaign so we know the disc can play through. But I still get the error at the same part(last level-others report similar results but at different points in the game). So what does that tell you? Bad dvd-drive...maybe.
My guess as an electronics lab tech (i work on portable biometric devices now) is that a batch of disc are just on the hairy edge of disc reading tolerance. The "better" consoles have no problem but there is a very small % that can't read it correctly. What matters is that theses disc are defective and that the majority of consoles are calibrated to read within this tolerance. This is good but what happens when the optics get a little off due to use? We'll see more and more of this issue. M$ should make a new batch and have a disc return plan similar to that of the scratched Halo3 LE disc. But this is a big PR mess and since I'm in the very small minority M$ might screw us on this deal. My 2nd guess is that it is a timing issue and we'll see a patch in a few days...Keep hope alive.

ok...so after spending an hour with xbox live tech support here is where we stand. I restarted the disc, i cleaned the disc, i power cycled the 360, I unplugged everything for 5 minutes, I played without the hdd, i played with a new profile, i moved profile over to memory card and it worked (til i got halfway through 3rd level and then game froze on me). I, now thinking that the hdd just needs to be reformatted and that it is a hdd problem, reformat the hdd with profile on mu and then switch profile back over to xbox.
Now here is where it gets crappy.
I was on the phone this whoel time with a guy i could barely understand and he said that people have been calling all week with this problem concerning the regular edition. I told him that i had a launch 360 and that I just didn't want it to red ring on me and he just started laughing (not very amused on this end).

all that being said, nothing works and he said that he did not know what the problem was but that i might have to get my hardware fixed. this leads me to believe it has to do with the older hdds not being able to read all the data from the disc.

sorry for my rant but this is really irritating me now.

@edog, yea you pretty much just reinforced my argument.

bad optical drives, not bad discs.

and the fact that your other discs work IS typical of how the optical drive fails. read my later comments. my problems started on 1 particular game, then spread to all of them within a month and a half.

so again, I stand by my assertion that Halo 3 discs are not defective (notwithstanding the scratched Limited Edition ones) but that a normal amount of failing 360s are being incorrectly diagnosed as bad Halo 3 discs when in fact this is not the case.

( more people playing Halo 3 than any other game = more peoples optical drives failing ON halo 3 than any other game )

of course I am speculating here. time will tell.

I had this problem frequently and found a quick fix. 1)Take the Halo3 disc out of the drive. 2)clean disc thoroughly with a soft nonabrasive cloth. 3)place disc back into 360, while being very careful not to smudge edges of disc. 4)unplug 360 from brick power supply. 5)transport 360 to nearest trashcan. 6)head to nearest electronics retail store and purchase PS3. 7)start spending money more wisely, dumbass.

I believe the Limited Edition was either assembled improperly or the case design is flawed. The guy at Gamestop kept checking cases until he found one that didn't rattle, and gave that one to me. Still, when I opened the case at home the discs were loose, perhaps why all these discs are scratched.

Sorry for my redundant post, I had not noticed there were many comments and an entire article about this.

@ #13, same thing happened on my brand new elite, the fire in the elevator RROD'd my brand new system, and now my back up system won't play the disc nicely either, since playing a campaign mission last night online I can't access any games, says player failed to load, and sometimes it says the disc read error....
I hate microsoft....this is my 3rd box and I think I'll be seeing a new one again soon....

I got this error when we were about 10-15 minutes away from beating the game. It has not loaded the last level since then. I contacted MS and they said I would have to purchase another copy of the game. Only the legendary edition is eligible for the disc replacement program. I also got the red ring of death this week after only a week of playing Halo 3. The unit has been sitting outside my media console for better ventilation.

aight
im fucking pissed so fucking much
my halo limited version fd up today
im so pissed
xcuse my language ppl but you serio dont kno how pissed i am
omfg
they better recall this right now n give me a new halo game within a week or i might have to curbstomp some bungie employees

Last night I had to stop playing because the game kept freezing up. My disc is not scratched and xbox works fine w/any other game. happened once a few days ago and then last night. Turned off the xbox, re-inserted the disc 3 more times and still it would freeze up in menu. Not happy!

I'd been playing online co-op with my friend to beat Legendary and right when we got to the end cut scene the error popped up on my screen.

My friend didn't get to see the end film....his first time through the game.(sry dude).

The strange part was...my game hadn't been out of my xbox since I'd put it in. When did it get scratched?!?

I had the unreadable disk error not once but three times... My first disk I returned and received a new one played to the 3rd level them froze and gave me an error... The same with the 2nd one but could not get into the game it would get to the start up menu and not show the text for what type of game I wanted to play. It is weird... My friend brought his disk over and his started up fine but eventually got the error message too. WTF.....

I've this problem.
My xbox360 is as new as Halo 3, and I'm also at my second copy of Halo 3. Still the error message pops up on the same place, right after the cinematics when I had finished the anti-airgun.

I sent a mail to Microsoft, and got a looney response:
"
I understand when you load a game disc or any other type of disc, you receive the following error message: “This disc is unreadable. It may be the wrong region for this console. Match the region of the disc to the console. Clean the disc with a soft cloth. Restart the console. For more help, go to www.xbox.com/support.” I deeply apologize for the inconvenience that this might have caused you."

I have a normal edition of Halo 3 and not all the time but sometimes, when the game is about to start or end online, the cd sounds like it stops spinning, and says "The disc is unreadable" and brings me back to the dashboard. I reload and play for a while and it happens again. WHATS THE DEAL!?

I was playing Halo 3 when suddenly it would not load the map, so I tried restarting the console and now no game will load. It will just say Reading, and then Open Tray, can anyone help me?

I've been having the loading problems like crazy with my copy. The disk is in perfect condition without a scratch on it. Everything works fine on it except for when you try to play campaign on Legendary. That's the only time it won't load. But it's getting old cause I just want to beat it on Legendary and don't want to send it in cause then I can't player multiplayer.

ive got legendary edition and when i try to do any campagn forge or multiplayer it says player has failed to load content ,, it might be becauuse of when it forces u to download the update on ure xboxx when u first put it in

Entirely true. I opted for the legendary disc after being told the limited edition was usually scratched. Played fine until this morning. Called Microsoft, they said the issue was with the disc and to send it to them. Thinking this was true, I went to my local game shop and purchased a new regular edition disc to play until that time. It also had the read error. Took it back to the shop, got a new one, (both were completely brand new sealed copies) and that one also did not work! Called Microsoft again, explained the situation, and they told me to send both discs in for replacements. I'm of the mind-set that it is a hardware issue, but according to Microsoft it is purely a game disc issue. I have since tried two friend's copies and all have the error. All of my other game discs work perfectly fine, and Halo 3 has worked fine since release date up until this morning!

Sincerely,
A confused and Halo-less reader.

It's either a disk error or an Xbox error. Halo did it a couple times and now COD4 does it a lot. I didn't take the disk out of the xbox and had just beat it. I put it up a difficulty level and started playing it. Then it pulled the same error. Now I can't play the campaign anymore on either Halo or COD and some of the multiplayer maps screw up.