here's what I did, rent game, copy to hard drive, put scratched game in, run from hard drive
Yay, a less illegal but still perfectly working method!
Although I did use the previous method with my copy of the motherloving orange box.
I was playing hl2, and for no reason it started freezing up and glitching. I restarted the xbox and went back to black mesa east, and it kept freezing up and glitching. Dog was sliding along the ground, the physics were dying, and eventually the game froze altogether. I took out the disk and found there was a gigantic ass crack. So, me being me, I go and rent a copy of the orange box and then return it saying that it got cracked after replacing it with the bad disk.
Now I can happily play TF2 on xbox live whenever i'm doing a huge render on the computer ;D