A good way to tell whether a used or rented Xbox 360 game disc is damaged is to install it to your hard drive. We do this for all used and rented games as soon as we get them home to confirm they'll play through. So far, we've only had one that gave an error, a rental copy of Wolfenstein, and sure enough it locked up about halfway through the game.
You will need about 8GB of free space on your hard drive per game. (Many games are smaller and a few may be bigger, but this is a good rule of thumb.)
1. Insert your disc and navigate to it on the dashboard.
2. Press the Y button to access Game Details.
3. You may need to wait several seconds for the install option to appear (in rare cases, such as some original Xbox games, this may not be permitted). Select Install Game.
4. Choose your hard drive and then wait several minutes for the install to complete.
If you get an error during install, try cleaning the disc using a disc cleaner or non-abrasive cloth and try again. If it still fails, return the game for a replacement right away!
If you're new to installing games on Xbox 360, here are some tips:
- You need to have the disc in the drive to actually play the game. This validates that you still own it.
- If you were only checking the disc and aren't planning to play it right away, you can feel free to delete the rather large file it creates. The easiest way is to just go back to Game Details and select Delete Game.
- For a few games such as with Halo 3, which is optimized for play from the game disc, installing to hard drive is not recommended and may actually slow the game. If you suspect this is the case, try it without the install and see if it's any faster.
This is good advice and since the HD install feature have I picked up a game that went bad later. Now that I have a 250 GB drive I expect I'll be playing from install a lot more anyway. :)