There’s an issue being experienced by quite a few owners of Electonic Arts’ NHL 09 game for the XBox 360. I am one of the unlucky ones who was hit by this bug.

I’ve been playing NHL09 since the day of release. I’ve really been enjoying the new Be A Pro gameplay. Last night I go to load up the game and to my dismay an error popped up on the screen stating “The disc is unreadable. Clean the disc with a soft cloth”. I found this really strange as the game was still in the drive from when I played it the night before. It as also strange that it was at not at a point in the game where the disc spins up to load anything. How can it report a dirty disc error when its not even trying to load off the disc? I popped out the disc, inspected it and saw absolutely no traces of dirt, dust, scratches or fingerprints. I re-inserted, the game loaded up to the point where I selected the type of game I wanted to play and boom, the error re-appeared. I ejected the disc once again, re-inspected it, and tried again… and again.. and again. I must have tried a dozen times without any changes. I even tried wiping the disc down a couple of times in case it was something I wasn’t seeing. No cigar. This morning I even picked up a disc cleaner from the local Future Shop but alas, it would not fix the dirty disc error message.

I decided to google the error specifically for NHL 09 (NHL 09 dirty disc) and after a few minutes of digging around I found some rather interesting information on a burried EA news release. It appears that the DRM for the game is causing this exact issue for some players, and that the fix is to clear the cache on the hard drive.

I followed the instructions (listed below) and hooray!, the game loaded an played flawlessly. Was I glad to hear that I wasn’t alone with this problem and that I didn’t have a defective disc on my hands.EA claims it will fix this issue on an upcoming patch but until then there’s a work around. Follow these steps to clear your XBox 360 cache:

• Turn on your Xbox 360 with no disc in the drive so you get the dashboard.
• Go to the hardware blade (last blade) and select memory.
• Select your hard drive and press Y to access to device manager
• Press the following buttons in order: X,X,LB,RB,X,X. This will clear your memory cache.
• Once its completed, insert your NHL09 disc and play away!