Since this is my primary blog now I thought I would post this random news that I'm pretty excited about. I also want to hopefully be able to help anyone else that comes looking for answers like I was.

About a month ago I put in my Halo 3 Disc into my Xbox 360 and it decided to start bouncing around and kill my DVD Drive. After that incident no disc would work in the drive resulting in a "Unplayable Disc" error in the dashboard. I decided to call Microsoft just to find out that it would cost me $100 because it was out of warranty. Since I'm not a huge Micro$oft fan I decided to try it myself knowing that it would void my warranty and any authorized repairs by M$.

I order my new Hitachi drive from richsxpparts.com and received it in the mail today. Surprising enough the drive looked exactly like my old one. The biggest challenge was opening the 360, but once I got passed that it was extremely easy. I simply followed Rich's insturctions and then did them in reverse order and it worked perfectly. The biggest trick is that the circuit board for the broken drive needs to be installed onto the new drive in order for it to work on your box. Apparently there is a special key on the board that has to be there to match up with your box.

I fired it up and it worked like a charm. I didn't save a lot by doing it myself, but I sure feel smart now!