Xbox Red Ring of Death

Yep, it happened. My Xbox 360 decided it was time to die. Like so many other people before me I have decided to chronicle my Microsoft repair experience so others may read this and know what to expect in their own time of need.

Saturday February 23rd 2008 @ 10:35 pm. I fired up my Xbox so I could enjoy my saturday night ritual of meeting friends, family, and co-workers online for some Call of Duty 4 action. Upon my initial boot up the screen locked up on the Xbox logo. I sat there for a second wondering what was going on as I had never experienced any issues at all with my Xbox. (It is about 6.5 months old). After about 3 seconds I powered down, waited a second and booted again. This time not even a boot screen would come up, I also noticed that the DVD drive wasn't spinning up either. So I removed my CoD4 disc and rebooted. Nothing again, but about two seconds into the black screen it happened....the red ring of death. I freaked.

I tried again in a few more seconds, same thing. So I jumped up, walked over to my pc and got on the Xbox live support page. I noticed that their support center was open until 1 a.m. Eastern time (NICE!) So I called the 1-800 number they listed for tech support and went through the automated answering service which then routed my call to a tech support person. This kind lady asked me what was happening with my Xbox, and when I told her she said that we would go through the motions of rebooting one more time. She also had me disconnect all the cables, re-attach them all and make sure they were secure, and I also had to remove the hard drive. Upon doing this the reboot process yielded the same results, three red bars flashing in my saddened face.

She then informed me that this was the indicator for a general hardware failure (I knew this already) and that Microsoft would be shipping me a prepaid return box in which to ship my Xbox back to them for repair. She also told me that it would be three to five days until I received said box. So far the experience has been as good as I could have hoped for. No haggling with tech support, and a kind ENGLISH speaking person on the other end of the line.

Stay tuned for updates as I complete the repair process. And leave feedback as to your own experiences with this as well.

Thanks.