- Joined
- Aug 30, 2016
- Posts
- 2,453
The other day I was gaming on the LaserActive and experienced some issues when playing one of the LDRom titles. A common problem when working on these units is getting the disc tray out of the locked position to work on the machine components. If the power is turned off and the laser/disc spindle assembly has not had a chance to retract back into the lower resting position, it can seem impossible to get the tray to back out. If you are unable to access or locate the gear assembly inside the unit to manually turn the gears, an alternative way to unwind the tray is to open the center cd access door on the front of the unit and carefully use a flat head screwdriver to gently rotate the white gears counterclockwise to slowly open the tray.
With the tray open and the top casing removed (2 screws on each side and 5 on the rear panel), it’s possible to work on the components.
In this case, I suspected a capacitor failure but after a few repair sessions it actually boiled down to needing to reseat the laser position switches. When these fail or the small pegs lose their position the laser will be unable to correctly position itself to read media and will keep hitting the spindle.
Hopefully, this will help someone else needing to do a little repair/maintenance work on one of these.
With the tray open and the top casing removed (2 screws on each side and 5 on the rear panel), it’s possible to work on the components.
In this case, I suspected a capacitor failure but after a few repair sessions it actually boiled down to needing to reseat the laser position switches. When these fail or the small pegs lose their position the laser will be unable to correctly position itself to read media and will keep hitting the spindle.
Hopefully, this will help someone else needing to do a little repair/maintenance work on one of these.
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