Am I endagering my XBOX360 by using a chipped disc?
By Sarah Richards
Yesterday, while I was taking a game disc out of its jewel case, the inner ring on the disc cracked (which I found troubling as I have never had this happen). Trying to assess the damage, I peeled away any bits of plastic that would come off as a result of the initial crack and ended up with this:
Essentially, one of the layers of plastic in the middle of the disc is now missing a piece, with no additional loose pieces still attached (to my best of knowledge). How dangerous would it be to use this disc to play? I've already tried it once, throwing caution into the wind and everything worked all right. Still, this may have just been luck.
12 Answers
Discs in any optical disk player (CD, DVD, Blu-Ray) spin at a very high RPM. Thus, they have to be carefully balanced to avoid doing damage to the disc or the player. Even putting a label on the disc can sometimes cause some minor balance issues. These balance issues can wear out the disc or the drive prematurely. Your loss of mass is relatively small and near the center of the disc, so while it's concerning, I'm not thinking it's panic time. I'd be more concerned if you were experiencing any unusual noise while using the disc.
However, the discs are gripped by the player in the center, so structural issues in this area are going to be particularly bad news. If the remaining plastic layers fail, there's a chance the disc could bump up against other parts of the drive at high RPM and cause damage.
My suggestion would be to replace it, if possible. You might try contacting the company, especially if the disc is relatively new. It might be considered a manufacturing defect.
Failing that, Nolonar's suggestion of installing the disc to your Xbox 360's hard drive might also be useful. However, doing the install is going to place a lot of strain on the disc, so if it's on the verge of failure it may just up and fail at that point.
2The Xbox 360 is not a record player. It doesn't touch the disk when it reads it so I can't imagine the disk potentially damaging the Xbox.
Whether the disk is likely to work is another matter. You might further damage the disk but you might as well if the alternative is never using it again.
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