This is happening to me. My disc doesn't have a single scratch on it and works whenever it feels like it. My xbox is less than a month old and no other games give me this problem

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I get these disc-errors with almost all the games I have. Powercycling the 360 always solve
temporarily the issue.

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Here's my swear-to-God-true-freaking-I'm-still-pissed-story that happened to me last night.

At the end of the game (no spoilers, don't worry), I made the heroic you-know-what, and as the final cut scene was playing, DISC READ ERROR. Maybe 5 seconds in to the last scene. Anyway, I go back in, and the last save was 3 hours before - the same place I was before I started playing yesterday! Stupid freaking disc read error, and, even more so, STUPID FREAKING "SAVE AND QUIT" OPTION! Why should I have to quit my game to save?

Dammit Halo 3, I love you so much. Why would you do this to me?

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I'm playing it everyday a lot since I got it on the 25th, MP, SP, Co-op, forge, and never had a single DDR. None of my over 20 friends that I play over the Xbox Live had any DDR neither.

Maybe the problem is not the disc but the DVD player. The 360's units are cheap and go down almost as often as PS2's DVD drives.

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@ Don't Drop The Soap

It's "You're." You should watch yourself before flaming.

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I've had this problem since launch. I had two awesome days when I managed to get it to work and finish the campaign, but now it's back to the exact same problem.

I ALWAYS get that message at the same time: When the campaign first starts, after the opening cutscene, and when loading the Sandtrap and Narrows maps.

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.

I could probably live with this for a while, but it's causing me to LOSE rank on Halo 3 MP. Every time I load one of those maps it acts like I deliberately dropped and hits me for 1 EXP. Usually I play with friends and they have the decency to veto for me, but I hate to ask them to do that. I still haven't played a game on Sandtrap.

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Oh, forgot to mention that I've been through four disks - all pristine and perfect - from three sources. Two from the store I bought it at (first was returned), one from my local Blockbuster and one from Gamefly.

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GAAARRRR!!!! I'm on my second copy (bought at circuit city), and it's giving me disc unreadable errors, too. There also doesn't appear to by any autosave, so when it stops reading, if I reload, I get to replay the last two hours. AWESOME! Then it fails at the exact same spot. AWESOME!

As much as I love(d?) Halo, this whole deal is bringing me right to the tipping point of saying SCREW IT, I'll get my money back, and never play Halo again. Bungie/MSFT FTW!

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My H3 disc works perfectly fine.Not ONE freeze or disc error.Been playing since launch.Most likely that person has a bad drive or its starting to go bad.

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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..

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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...

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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.

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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.

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@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.

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How is this for being born under a bad sign... I put Halo 3 into my 360 and I got through the intro, pressed start and, and, and WTF the red ring of death. My 360 died. Restart after restart the 3 red lights.
Has this happened to any one else?

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Man this is PITIFUL.

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

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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.

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@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.

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@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.

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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.

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