360 customer support, or lack thereof

I was trying to help a friend of Theo's get his old red-ringed Xbox 360's 20GB drive moved over to his new Xbox 360 Elite's 120GB drive. Actually, I had been trying to do this over a month ago, when I had the extreme pleasure NOT of talking to Microsoft for an hour and a half on why their data transfer system was not working. At the time the disc included with the transfer cable kept coming up as "unreadable." They gave me lots of things to try, including deleting corrupted files, clearing out the cache with the secret keystroke command, etc.

So yesterday I finally had a chance to update the dashboard, clear out the cache, search for corrupted files, all that junk. Of course, this did not help. The disc still tries to load and then either reports as "unreadable" or gives a gray screen that says something like "This disc must be loaded into an Xbox 360 console." I even tried the disc on my 360 at home. Same problem. Sure sounds like an unreadable disc to me. Doesn't it to you?

Called Microsoft. Talked to one person who immediately transferred me to another person. I tell the second person that I'm trying to help transfer files from one 360 to a new one. He says "Well, you'll need the Data Transfer Kit for that." I tell him I know, I have it, it's already all plugged in, and that the disc turns up as "unreadable" on multiple systems. He then tells me that I've got it connected wrong... he says the old 20GB drive has to be on the OLD console, not the new one. I point out to him that p.5 of the kit's manual says to do it the way I'd done it (old drive attached to NEW console, then 120GB drive plugged in via USB).

I then ask why there is such a reluctance to send me a new disc, when the simplest solution is that the disc is unreadable. After two separate hold times, he grudgingly says they'll send out a whole new kit, and that it'll take... 3 to 4 weeks. I ask if it'd be any faster to just send out the disc rather than the whole thing, since that's the only thing needed, and he says they apparently can't break the kits apart like that.

Ugh. It's really hard to be a 360 booster with support like that.