I've had several problems with my 360s (yes, check the plural, as in more than one) including the dreaded Red Ring of Death, and now my new one has got into the habit of constantly ejecting the disc drive several times in a row whenever I put a new disc in. Hooray! Luckily, or perhaps I'm just blissfully ignorant and haven't noticed it, but I've yet to have my systems scratch my game discs up. So just how big a problem is it anyways?

From the article:

Around the launch of Xbox 360, reports came in of unlucky gamers discovering scratches on their game discs. Thing is, outside of the odd technical failing, they weren't that mysterious; moving an Xbox 360 while it's accessing a disc results in a bunch of scary sounding noises emitting from the machine before it spits out a severely scratched and possibly unplayable game disc. Microsoft never said much about the issue, instead asking gamers experiencing hardware issues to send in their machines for a check up.

Several companies, though, started profiting off the error, as it was later discovered the scratching could be prevented with the installation of foam pads on the disc drive. Many modern drives have such pads to protect discs if unintentional movement occurs -- in this case, moving the Xbox 360 from a horizontal to vertical position or visa versa -- as part of their design, but they are not present in the Xbox 360. Hardware site Llaama.com has a step-by-step guide to installing your own foam pads, which then produced scratch-free discs during tilting, and Zoonen introduced Xbox 360-specific scratch prevention kits, which included instructions to attach their foam pads.

Microsoft countered most complaints by pointing to the hardware's instruction manual, which detailed that moving the console during use was a bad idea. So, you ask, why are we talking about a launch problem more than a year and a half later? In April, Dutch TV show Kassa filed a report on a boy unable to play some of his favorite Xbox 360 games due to scratches. Microsoft refused to replace the discs, reportedly citing sunlight, heat, improper use of the CD or moving the machine during play as user-responsible reasons for the issue. Kassa then ripped apart the Xbox 360 and discovered the probable reason for the scratches: no foam pads.

Read the full article over at 1up.com