For a long time now (several months at least), my Xbox 360 has had difficulty reading discs. Most of the time, it would ignore the game partition and go straight to the DVD-video partition, which meant I would get the ironic message telling me to insert the disc into an Xbox 360 to get it to play. Eventually, if I ejected and re-inserted the disc, it would play.
Over the last two months or so, that’s been getting a lot worse. Actual “disc unreadable” errors, complete refusal to even acknowledge the presence of a disc. For the last couple weeks, all I’ve been doing is playing video files and the occasional foray into XBLA.
Today, that’s all fixed. Because my machine’s out of warranty, I couldn’t bring myself to send it to Microsoft. And then I found Modspace. Craig quickly diagnosed a bung laser over the phone and said he could fix it on the spot. I drove it over, dropped it off, and was able to pick it up an hour later.
Rushing home, I was very happy to find that it read discs on the first go. Games that gave me trouble before (especially Soulcalibur IV and Lego Indiana Jones) run smoothly and with no problem.
If you need some repairs to your console and don’t want to go through the manufacturer (and are located in the Sydney region), you could do a lot worse than go to Modspace. I’m already considering getting them to mod my original Xbox for me.