I am an Idiiot – really [pictures 800kb]

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I, LittleSinchen, proclaim myself as a complete idiot.


If you ever buy a Wii with the description "faulty disc drive" don't be as dumb as I have been yesterday. My thoughts:
  • Faulty disc drive? Maybe the lens is dirty.
  • It is a black Wii → Most likely D3-2 drive which means it will ignore anything that is not a genuine Wii or GC disc.
  • Let's see if the drive even recognizes a disc. *Inserts Wii disc*
The result? The drive pulled in the disc like normal. The disc starts spinning. Normal sounds. Why does nothing show up on the Disc Channel? Not even "The disc could not be read."? Suddenly the sound changed! The drive almost sounded like some electric grinding machine. Krrrrrrrzzzz! Rrrrrrr! Mooooooop! Krrrrrz!

Then "An error has occurred. Eject the disc…blablabla"

Disc comes out… deep scratch, perfectly circular. What on earth did this drive just do with my game disc?! I was able to get rid of most of the scratch with car polish. However, CleanRip still reports an unrecovered read error. Circular scratches are very bad for optical discs.
=======

Today I decided to open that thing up. There was children's play money in there. A cardboard 2-Euro "coin" as well as cardboard 5 Cent. The position was perfect. It reached above the laser and would have f…ed up every disc.
Sinchen →
kopf-gegen-wand-smilies-0001.gif
​

Note to self: Always disassemble a Wii with "faulty drive" before inserting a disc. You never know what the previous owner put in there – other than discs.

Pictures:
01.JPG 02.JPG 03.JPG


Update:
The disc drive is fully working now – since I took out that &"$"(.

Last update on this:
I sold that Wii truthfully describing the issues that this Wii has had and that opening was required. Got a few € more than I paid while keping the original packaging and manual. No hard- or software modification done to that unit.
Hopefully the new owner is happy with it.
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Comments

eyeliner
Well, considering the fast spinning rate, even a paper sheet could damage the disc. a cardboard can do it even better.
Positive side: You have a working Wii now!
 
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Jaxom
You're not an idiot, you just didn't anticipated the stupidity of the previous owners. At least, it has taught you a valuable lesson. I just hope you didn't insert a rare Wii game into your disc drive (The Last Story, for instance). :unsure:
 
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KleinesSinchen
@Localhorst86 toothpaste is a little rough. The particles in there are too big.
@eyeliner Exactly. No really good cardboard, but completely trapped, aimed at one point and then the fast spinning.
@DinohScene Children sometime do such things. And the adults should teach them not to. If something like this happened to me, I would have opened the Wii to show the child what just happened – not sold the console with "faulty drive".
@Ludicario Naaah. It was a disc the local public library did not want anymore and sold for 2 Euro.

The game disc is still working – just a clean 1:1 copy is impossible (which I created before – it is like anancasm: Get data storage media → create backup instantly)
 
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gamesquest1
I always test drives with a crappy old CDR, although I have done this a few times which is why I do that now

or on systems where the drive is married and I want to check it will read games I usually have a few copies of Fifa lying around for that initial test
 
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Alexander1970
Children......:rolleyes:

This Story reminds me so on my very first Wii.
It is reading no Medias because......Children feeded it with 5 DVD´s......until today I wonder how this was possible to get 5 DVDs into this Drive Slot...

In this Case I also tried to get an (6th) DVD inside but - was no possible....:rofl2:
So I opened the Wii - removed the DVD Collection - put all together and....it worked.

@KleinesSinchen

As you maybe know,this Wii is still my Test Wii and it reads Medias in all "Shapes".....<--- in jedem Zustand.
(except USBLoaderGX Loader IOS is set to 58.....:rofl2:).

I hope this gives you a good Feeling on your "new" Wii too.

Thank you.:)



P.S: Do not say you are an Idiiot....please.:)
 
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KleinesSinchen
@gamesquest1 I would have preferred it that way. Laser cables (moving upwards) on some PS2 slim can do similar damage. Easy to see on PS2 slim and easy to test on unmodded console with DVD+-R (Video) or CD-R (audio).
On this Wii a dummy disc would most likely not have shown the problem. The GC/Wii copy protection is on the inner side of the disc. If you look at the first picture you can see the laser could move freely to the inside. It started normally, successfully validated the legit disc and then… moved the laser to the outer part, pushed the cardboard upwards → Rrrrrrr!
I guess the drive would have rejected DVD-R without even moving the laser to the outer part.

@alexander1970 Why… and how? Really, how could anyone force so many discs into a slot-in drive at once?! Using a hammer? And even more important: how did the complex mechanism survive this? I've never opened a Wii until today and this slot-in drive with the ability to catch 8cm discs looks complicated.

Why not say I'm an Idiiot? This is a great typo, fits the Wii topic; changed the title.
 
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gamesquest1
yeah thats what I meant about using crappy Fifa 2014 disks etc on systems where dvd videos aren't an option, but oh well I guess if you don't work on too many systems taking it apart and giving it a clean at the same time wouldn't harm, but if your testing a fair few consoles the time spent stripping them all down would be a pain, especially when 99/100 consoles wouldn't have anything inside

that said of all the consoles likely to have crap shoved into them I would say the wii is the most likely, although I did fix a xbox one s what had about 8 playing cards inside....guess that was the magic trick
 
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Silent_Gunner
Recommendation for all systems with disc drives, especially for really old systems, and these DVD-player-wannabe pieces of plastic:

REPLACE THESE WITH A METHOD THAT DOESN'T USE MOVING PARTS!

With how many Everdrives and equivalents there are for other systems, and ways of playing software through means that doesn't require physical media on the post 6th-generation systems (and even the GC has a way of loading games via a certain Action Replay memory card with a microSD Card slot, the PS2 has OPL, and the Xbox has been cracked wide open and modded every with way possible at this point), that disc drive shouldn't be seeing any use.

As for the 9th generation consoles coming with less than 4TB of internal storage because SSD? I think that's where the price cuts are going to hurt the consumer the most, and as much as I'd love to do away with HDDs, they still have their uses, and storing large amounts of games like most of today's games and their 100+GBs of Day 1 updates is going to make the 9th generation come up to the slow start...if companies not wanting to invest into American manufacturing and still depend on China even in the wake of the current coronavirus outbreak, not to mention a booming American economy, won't cause it to do so in the first place.
 
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