Question on disc scratches

[maroonandwhite]

Anyone know anything about how a scratch on an Xbox 360 game is handled by the laser/drive? I just bought one on ebay and it has two small and not very deep scratches towards the outer rim running perpendicular with the circle. Just wondering if I should send it back or try it out tonight.

[Jonnin]

First just try it. If the disc does not work, you can look into polishing it out with software on a PC dvd writer or special devices made for the purpose, or possibly do it yourself if you know how to polish things to an extreme level. Commercial discs are plastic over medium, and the plastic can be scratched to a pretty high degree before failures happen. If the scratch is deep enough to damage the media, its not fixable. If the scratch is so bad it deflects the laser during reading, thats when yo polish it out, if it did not hit the media. Cheap disks, the media is on the label (most cheap home writtern discs) and those are most often damaged from the label side, not the plastic underside -- a scratch on top ruins the disc very easily. I dont think any commercial discs use that type, its too easy to ruin them.

[maroonandwhite]

Thanks. That cleared it up alot. Going by your info it would just be a scratch on the plastic and did not go all the way down. The only other thing I am wondering is if it matters that this is a dual layer DVD. I am guessing the same rule applies as long as the media isn't damaged it may work fine or at least can be polished?

[Caster]

Back when I played COD alot, my copy of call of duty 2 got scratched up real bad. You have nothing to lose if the disc isn't working....

I used my neighbor's dewalt variable speed car polisher. Using a little dab of 3M Fill and Glaze, I buffed it out until it was smooth, then used Crystal Pink car polish and that sucker looked like new. Worked perfect till I sold my xbox and quit playing.

[maroonandwhite]

Yeah this is a copy of Black Ops. The first one I bought on ebay for $35 came with a copy of Modern Warfare 2 but the day it was supposed to ship the guy told me his dog ate it (sold it for more to someone else). This is the second copy and it didn't come with a box and has these small scratches!! I just don't want to wait any longer on another one if this will work fine.

[Guest nicemac]

You can sometimes polish surface scratches out of discs with toothpaste. You have to use paste, not gel.

[Jonnin]

Dual layer is still medium in the middle and plastic on both sides of commercial disks. You can polish either side of those as needed. Again, just try it first, they will work with some pretty bad ones more often than not.

Last time I did it I just used diamond dust, because I had it. It was totally overkill, of course, but it does work.

[Guest Lester Weevils]

I once bought one of those CD scratch repair kits and found it labor-intensive or ineffective at polishing out scratches. In other words, use the paste and tools provided in the kit and work until I get bored and the scratches were not yet polished out.

So maybe the CD scratch repair kits are a waste of money unless maybe some kits are better than the one I got.

Other polishing methods, CAREFUL buffing wheel, rouge, etc might be more effective than a CD repair kit.

Try the disc first. It may work fine scratched. Discs were designed to work OK even with fairly severe surface defects. The format contains lots of data interleaving, data duplication and error correction to surmount problems with minor scratches.

[G27]

For the record, scratches that go from center of disc to our edge in a straight line (perpendicular to the data) are much easier for the error correction to work out - circular scratches are nearly impossible to work through.

[maroonandwhite]

Well I played last night for a while and it seemed to work just fine. I'm going to leave it alone and if I ever have any trouble out of it I will try one of the methods you guys mentioned and cross my fingers. By that time I'm sure something else will have been released and I could buy another copy on craigslist for cheap. Thanks