Hi All.
After finding my Reach disc wouldn't work, I found this forum and all the postings around the net. I started to do some experimenting to see if I could get my 2nd disc to work and I'd like to share my conclusions with you all.
First of all, I've narrowed it down to the hard drive - I believe it is the read/write speed or capability of the hardware. After testing with a refurb 20gb and an original 4gb, the most often I get the game working actually comes from having no hard drive attached. The refurb never works, and once I have gotten the 4gb to work. Also of note is that the manufacturers of the hard disks are different - the one from China will work, the one from Thailand will not.
I have circumvented using the hard drive by moving my profile to a memory unit and saving my Reach progress on there as well. This supports the hard drive hypothesis because the flash memory has an infinitely higher read/write speed.
After many attempts to narrow down the exact issue, as there seem to be alot of variables here, I have found some other information. For instance, the game will never spin up
correctly if I boot the xbox up with the game already in the drive. In fact, this occasionally results in a rrod.
There is one more thing I have found as well. In order to get the game to be recognized by my system, I have to boot it up while holding the sync button on the console. As many of you know, this is done to boot the console without loading system updates. While doing this, you will notice the xbox boots without any green rotating lights, and if you see no lights at
all, but eventually the dashboard loads onscreen, you have done it correctly. This leads me to believe that once you have updated your storage medium, there may be an incompatibility issue. When I load Reach, it asks me to update the memory card, but I have not done so so I can play through the campaign. Once I am done with the campaign I will attempt to update the memory unit so that I can play matchmaking, because without the update you are unable to go online.
I hope this helps you all, it might be a way to fix at least some of your problems. I can't guarantee this will help everyone, but I really wanted to play Reach and I sure as heck
don't have the money for a new xbox, so I was pretty methodical about trying to get it to work.
Good Luck Everyone!