Xbox 360 troubleshooters - help a brother out?

[gonores]

OK, here's the problem.

Playing NHL2k7, my 360 freezes up at a very particular point...right after a game during a season. I'll exit the game, and a screen will pop up asking me to save my profile. If I choose "no," it freezes right there. If I choose "yes," I get to go to the save profile screen, save my profile, and then it freezes when I try to hit the back button.

A few other tidbits about my 360.

-When I first bought it, I was fooling around a little with it, and ended up picking it up while a game was running in it, and it ended up scratching the disk beyond repair...I think this might have damaged the reader. Not positive how that works though.

- I used to constantly get "disk is unreadable" errors with any game. When I went to the game store, the guy said lots of 360s had that problem, and the issue was with the hard drive. I went out and got a new hard drive, and the unreadables subsided quite a bit, though didn't go away completely.

- When my game freezes, it FREEZES. I dont get a screen to pop up telling me any errors or anything, and I can't shut down the xbox with my controller at all. I have to get up and turn it off myself. I'm not sure if that is a clue or not.

- Other games do not have this freezing problem, as best as I can tell, and NHL only freezes in that one spot, but it is very consistent with the freeze.

Naturally, I've tried cleaning the disk and other quick fixes....definitely not looking like it helps at all. The NHL disk is, to the naked eye, completely unharmed.

So where does the problem lie? Is it with the disk or the xBox? Sorry, I'm quite the n00b when it comes to video game systems, as NHL2k7 is the first game to really hold my interest in 6 years.

[Pinchot]

2K Sports Forums

Gonores, looks like the problem is the game. I experienced something similar with MLB 2K6 where the game would freeze at certain points or when I played in certain modes. Not sure if there's much you can do here.

[gonores]

what about buying a new disk? would that help, or is the entire series flawed?

[Pinchot]

[ QUOTE ]
what about buying a new disk? would that help, or is the entire series flawed?

[/ QUOTE ]

I returned one copy of MLB 2K6 and I thought the freezing got a little better, but I didn't play it much more after that. Maybe give that a try.

[cbloom]

I'll let y'all in on a xbox game developer secret : whenever they have any kind of mysterious crash in the game they pop up a message like "disk is unreadable". You're not allowed to pop up "software failure" or anything like that because it makes the system look bad.