Gaming Motherf#%k. "Unable to read the disc"

[Dacvak]

So, I just spent the last 72 hours of my life trying to get AR to work with backup GameCube games. Literally the FIRST time I got it working, the game ended up freezing on me.

Now I have a dead drive.

Any disc I insert, backup, Wii game, original GameCube game, comes up as "Unable to read the disc" from the launch screen. This is the second time this has happened to me; the first time, I had to replace the whole drive.

So, what do I do? Am I completely boned? Do I need to buy a new drive? Are there any simple fixes worth trying?

I have been noticing my Wii making strange noises lately. Maybe the DVD drive was failing all this time?

What should I do?

 

[Jdbye]

It does sound like your drive is dead - the likelihood of it happening twice (if even once) is pretty low though, so if that's the case, then you're really unlucky.

However, you can still run Wii games in a USB Loader - so your Wii isn't worthless without a DVD drive.
But if you want to run GameCube games, it looks like you need a new drive.

 

[RchUncleSkeleton]

sounds like you strained the laser trying to read a poor copy, so now you are pretty much screwed. You might be able to get nintendo to replace the drive if you just say it started doing that and do not mention backups or AR, but that is a slim chance. My advice is dont try to play burned games next time, or at least make sure the copies are high quality.

 

[Jdbye]

I haven't heard of many cases with dead drives because of poor copies (well not on the Wii) but that's most likely the reason, i guess. Some of my older copies were poor quality because of the burner I used.

My drive won't read dual layer discs anymore (well, it reads them sometimes, but it takes 20 tries and freezes quickly)

Wii drives aren't that horribly expensive though, DealExtreme has them for $41.45, so my suggestion is:

First, try to send it in to Nintendo. Delete anything to do with homebrew or pirating. As long as you do that, they shouldn't notice. Additionally, you could brick it intentionally to make sure they won't find any traces - however I wouldn't recommend that. It makes it harder for them to check though.

If you've opened your Wii for any reason, it has to look like it was never opened. If it looks very obvious that it has been opened, don't even bother sending it in until you've done something about that.

Second, if they require payment, buy a new drive from DealExtreme and install it yourself instead.

Either way, if you want to run DVD backups, I suggest you try a different computer or burner, and burn all your games again with verbatim DVD-Rs. And use USB Loader for Wii games

If you've gotten any DREs (Disk Read Errors) from your backups, chances are your burner or DVDs are of poor quality. I haven't gotten a single DRE with verbatims since I got a new PC.