Ah, and the thot plickens. I actually played ODST all the way through a couple of months ago when I first bought it. Other than some stupid long load times, and one or two DRE's, no problem.
Fast forward to last night. Reach is on the way and I thought "Hell, I'll play 2, 3 and ODST through for a warm up!"
Halo 3 was acting weird, with audio glitches and stuttering after loading a save game on 2 or 3 occasions as I made my way through the game again (this time). I don't recall any problems of this nature the first 5 times I played it through.
Next up, ODST. The opening montage plays through, but I notice I can't skip the intro sequence by pressing "any button". Weird. Then, after the intro concludes, the CD drive spins up to just this side of escape velocity, the screen goes black, and.....nothing. So, reboot, try again....same thing. Crap. Re-reboot after removing the disc. And this is where our hero gets super-charged pissed off.
Because, on reboot, my 360 starts with the initial splash screen, and then the pretty green and silver "X" logo just sits there and spins its wheels. No dashboard. No saved games (we're talking like, 600 hours of my life gone to Oblivion [get it? "Oblivion"?], no gamer score (whatever), no xbox. Which is problematic, because, after my third system bricked with the old RROD, I decided to be a little proactive, bought an Arcade (Jasper, I think, anyway both chips are 65nm parts), installed two custom retentioned heat sinks (Thermalright XP-90 and an Asetek Vapochill [$9 at SVC.com kids]) and dropped the whole shebang into a Lian Li 360 case, thereby voiding the hell out of my warranty.
After cursing Microsoft, Bungie, their children and their children's children, I thought about, and solved the problem thus - I replaced the ODST disk in the DVD drive, rebooted the system, and Voila!, I have my 360 back. The first thing I did was to clear the cache, uninstall Halo3 and ODST, test the system with an xbox disk (okee dokee) and a 360 disk (ditto) and then trucked my ass to the nearest game stop to sell all Bungie products and to hell with Reach altogether.
So, what have we learned? This problem is almost certainly related, in this case, to the hard drive, which is a 1st gen 20GB drive reserved from my very first 360 (which was a Xenon?, both chips were 90nm, purchased in summer, 2006). The system booted to the dashboard w/ no hard drive fine, then hung again when I replaced the hard drive, then booted to the dashboard again when I put the ODST disk back in the drive and rebooted.
I know that some persons reported DRE's with 120GB and 60GB HD's. Not sure exactly why ODST and Halo 3 code doesn't like my 20GB drive. Bad juju? Libra rising? Who knows. Who cares. That's the vagaries of quantum physics boys and girls.
It shouldn't surprise us when it fails, so much as amaze us that it ever really worked in the first place.
One last detail. The Arcade system (which is currently everything in my 360, except the hard drive) was purchased in early 2009. Can't remember which DVD manufacturer, sorry. Hitachi, perhaps? But I really don't think this problem is related (solely) to the DVD. That may be part of the problem, but the hard drive is integral in some fashion, or rather the OS or driver files or .ini or EPROM call outs or whatever the hell other voodoo magic makes that little box sound like a tornado and play the sweet ass games before self-engulfing in fiery conflagration sometime in the first 2 weeks to 2 years after purchase.
That was little dancey, but, there you have it, my two cents worth.