Xbox 360 Dvd Rom Laser Tweak

The XBox 360 has different dvd drives, here's a fix you can try if your xbox 360 fails to read games.

If you need to replace your xbox 360 dvd rom drive, or you just have the dvd tray jamming, see the videos further down this page for help.

  The different types of XBox 360 dvd drives.

I have been notified that many of you have had the dirty disk error and your XBox 360 drive has stopped reading discs altogether.

Before you go and throw out that drive or even replace the laser, try tweaking the pot.

The pot is the drives calibration and is factory set, usually quite low, to discourage some cheaper backup media to be read.

It is also possible that it may have become un-calibrated, or that your laser has got weaker over time.

If one of the following symptoms describe your problem, then Pot laser tweaking might be what's needed.

• Dirty disc error on many original games.
  
• DVD drive wont read certain discs Dl Dvdr, CD-R etc.
  
  
  
  Heres what's required for this fix :-
  
  
• Small screwdriver
  
• Multimeter
  
• Patience
  
  

I will assume you can open the Xbox 360 console up.

Power up your XBox with the case open and press the button to open your drive.

With the drive open, unplug the power cord, this will keep your drive tray out.

Remove the 4 screws from the top of the DVD drive, there is no need to remove the drive from the console.

The top should come off easily.

Locate the pot.

The pot is actually a screw which is known as a Potentiometer, hence the name pot, It will look like this:-

Next get your multimeter and set it to 2000 ohms

For those who don't know what a multimeter is see above.

Touch one end on the left leg of the pot, Top green arrow, See above, and the other on the top of the screw, Bottom green arrow.

You should get a multimeter reading. For example 1019 ohms. Yours will be slightly different, as all xbox 360 lasers are set different etc.

Please note different drives can give very in different readings.

For this test my dvd drive happened to be a Phillips, See picture at top of page to find out the make of your xbox 360 drive.

Next step is to slightly turn the screw clockwise and re-test with the multimeter.

It is very important to turn the pot screw only a tiny bit, when you take a reading you will understand, a small turn is all you need for this.

 
What you're hoping to do is change the resistance to a level where it happily reads your disks.

Move in increments of about 100 ohms, but no less then 500 ohms , as any less could burn out your laser.

The actual reading which will work for each drive will be different, so this is where much patience is required.

To test the new settings, simply replace the top cover of the drive, don't bother putting the screws back in yet, test with a disc that wouldn't read before.

In my experience, I personally found that i had no joy until 555 ohms, where it started to read the dvd, but i found the drive was noisy and the game froze.

I tweaked it back up in very tiny steps and the drive operated perfect at 625 ohms.

For thompson drives i Recommend no less than a reading of 780 ohms.

For those with Phillips drives no less than 520 seems optimal.

Not sure about other Xbox 360 drives, Have never needed to do them yet.

I hope you find this guide useful, and are successful in getting your xbox 360 to read the games again.

For those that have tried this and it hasn't helped, It maybe time to just replace your xbox 360 dvd drive, This can be done easily enough and is quite cheap to do, see the video below.

Replacing Your Xbox 360 Dvd Drive - Video.

Xbox 360 Problems and Solutions

Dvd Tray Jamming Fix - Video