I have had the same problem with many games. Bioshock and Halo 3 both gave me the same error. First i thought my X360's dvd-drive is faulty and i send it for repairs. When it returned the same problem continued.

I then replaced both Bioshock and Halo 3 discs and the problem still continued. Then i tried without the Hard Drive connected and both games work. Then i tried resetting the cache, which didn't help, and after that i formatted the Hard Drive, which didn't help either. Only by disconnecting the hard drive the games work. Now i bought a 512mb Memory Unit and im saving my games with it until i can get a new hard drive from the repair center.

I suggest that people who have this problem try starting the game without the hard drive and report of their findings.

Who'll give me odds that this turns out to be Microsoft's equivalent of the whole Sony rootkit debacle?

Wonder if the multiple copies this person got counted as multiple sales?

It's an interesting sales technique if it does, and would explain it being such a success - although it's a bit underhanded even for Microsoft to specifically ship invalid copies to improve their sales figures ;)

I couldn't resist. ;)

D-R-M!

Isn't it odd that after what seems a software update; the game started to have issues; yet when the hard drive is removed, it plays just fine!?

Microsoft Quality Assurance?

Let's see, a cut-down PC running a cut-down version of windows has unspecified issues running a program? Where's the surprise there? Just gives more weight to the reasons why I'd never buy one!

I have had this exact problem, it was very frustrating and disappointing for my first halo game. I got half way through the campaign, then got the error . To rub salt into the wound, I also lost 2 levels of save games too.

Online research I took seems to suggest that the problem is actually hard disk, bad sector related and not necessarily dvd related.

Many users I conversed with on forums have had 3 or 4 discs with the same problems and in the end been asked to return their HD to M$ for repair. As my damaged levels loaded sometimes after deleting numerous HD files, perhaps its right.

A new disc from amazon touch wood seems to have sorted my problem (or at least I havent had the problem so far), but again that doesnt prove my hard disk doesnt have some fault.

I get these 'dirty disc' errors on my Forza 2 disc. Drove me crazy. Even went back to exchange for another disc. Had only been out of the sealed box for 5mins before my 360 claimed the disc was 'dirty'. I doubt it!!

I've heard that it' down to the speed of the drive, and the way that the data is streamed from the disc to keep loading times down. If the 360 isn't kept fed with data at a high rate it assumes that there must be a fault with the disc.

... oh look, a transient read error on a removable drive, there's no way we could hope to recover from that so let's tell the user to reboot. Pathetic.

(Even more pathetic is the fact that the system almost certainly actually /can/ handle a read error, and the advice is in fact completely gratuitous and bogus and won't make any difference, but it's a knee-jerk MS instinct to tell everyone to reboot all the time because they have no faith in their own software.)

This started happening with a Madden 08 disk I've got. It hasn't been removed from the 360 since it was purchased - but developed this 'issue' mysteriously over the weekend. It's not every time.. restarting sometimes fixes it.

Microsoft added Windows Genuine Advantage to the xbox