This was
posted over at my personal blog as a comment, and it makes sense:
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Ah…this is not a format flaw, but rather just a simple case of “premature EJECTulation” (I’ll assume ownership of that term thank you very much). As the local Best Buy (or equivalent) electronics ‘big box’ stores are probably starting to experience increasing lineups at the Customer Service counters for this same “problem”, you are not the first to blame the technology or the format for what is merely one part product manufacturing flaw, and one part user lack of patience. As I’m sure you already figured out through testing that Disc 2 is the ONLY one of the 7 discs that boots up a “loading” screen at startup. This is because it is the ONLY disc of the 7 with the special online features. The loading screen marks the standby while your 360 HD-DVD drive initiates the download of a rather large but necessary cookie. Depending on the speed of your internet connection, this cookie can take anywhere from 1 minute to (I’ve heard up to) 10 minutes to fully download. The down side is that if you do not allow this necessary cookie to fully download, the disc will not boot up properly….as it appears you found this out the hard way.
The manufacturers of the Heroes HD-DVD boxset made two simple mistakes; #1] they used a basic “loading” placeholder without a counter, file percentage, or any other marker to denote that something important was happening in the background and you had to wait it out. #2] they put a cancel button on the loading screen that failed to have the features as described in mistake #1.
This combination led to your “premature EJECTulation” - in turn not allowing the necessary cookie to download to your hdd - that caused the disc to freeze up when it realized there was only a partially DL’ed cookie on the hdd because you cancelled the required DL before it was completed. Okay…so before you go searching for your bill of sale and running off to your point of purchase, there is a very simple and painless fix!
From your XBL dash, flip blades to the Settings section. Go to “saves” and open the HD-DVD folder. Delete all the save files since they are not named to allow recognition of the specific Heroes file from the bunch, so unfortunately you have to knock em all out to make it work….another option, if you have A LOT of time and feel you need to save your cookies and saved scenes from other movies in your library is to delete files one at a time and test the Heroes disc in between each one until it loads….this will take A LOT of time however, I cannot stress more.
Once the cache is cleared, allow the disc to cycle the complete startup. The loading screen will appear for a short while, then the screen goes blank for a second, then the loading screen returns with a “cancel” button underneath this time. DO NOT HIT THE CANCEL BUTTON!!!!!!!!! Be patient…let it work in the background - go make dinner, or play with the dogs, or whatever you need to do to blow off a few minutes. It will finish the DL and boot up normally. The up side is that it only needs to do this once (unless you clear the saves cache again). After this cookie is saved, every time you insert Disc 2 going forward, it will startup completely normally. Problem solved….enjoy the rest of Heroes in HD splendour! Glad to be of help.
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