Xbox 360 starts reading disc then says open tray , why can't the 360 read disc?

Hello, My name is Jesse. I'm an Independent Advisor and a member of the Microsoft community and I'd love to assist you today.

Kindly check this guide on how to troubleshoot Xbox 360 disc drive errors https://support.xbox.com/en-US/help/hardware-ne...

Hi,

Unfortunately this is a common fault with consoles of this age. Even an Xbox 360E - the last model of the Xbox 360 console range - would be knocking on nearly 10 years now. I suspect yours is probably even older.

The optical drive has a laser and these will fail at some point, there's no stopping this, it's simple wear and tear. You insert the game disc, the console attempts to read the disc, but fails and says 'Open Tray'. It says Open Tray because the console can't read discs (it thinks there is nothing there) and it can't read it because the laser has failed.

Microsoft no longer repairs Xbox 360 consoles. So to get this fixed you'll need an alternative solution (we don't allow discussions regarding self repairs here). Or buy another second hand Xbox 360 console.

The Disc Drive Solution Didn't Help.The Xbox 360 at first made a small circle scratch around the inner ring of the disc however it does not affect the the disc as it works fine. The past year all my disc sometimes went unreadable.(more often on certain disc)
The past few months the xbox 360 started to say open tray to every game I played however after reopening for 5 minutes or less it worked. Now this month it started to take 30 minutes of reopening for the tray to work. Then it took 1 entire day of reopening
to work. Now it its been a week of reopening and it doesn't work. Im assuming its not going to read if its been a week. However when it reads the disc I can hear the certain noises like the fan and everything indicating its spinning and reading. However when
it can't read it seems like the laser is making this light swishing/swissing noise is all I can describe it. It goes open tray sometimes unrecognised disc or play DVD. When it did read my games however when I reset my console it wouldn't be able to read again
and go open tray which I had to repeat opening the tray.

if you have an old xbox 360 then sorry to say but its time to buy a new one, old xbox's have isues reading new game formats due to wear and tear, that will be why your xbox will be saying unrecognizable disc or open tray

I recently read about this, I have this same issue, where it says reading then goes back to "open tray"

gaming.operationreality.org/.../xbox-360-disc-format-firmware-roll-out

I am currently waiting for an email reply for my issue tho, not sure if they will actually replace your xbox like it says, but I would certainly like to be able to play discs again...