PC help: CD tray is sulking - any hope of DIY-repair?

No, the cup-holder didn’t break off. :wink:

The CD-Tray of my (old Pentium III) PC is sulking . That is, it’s open in the full position. When I press the close button, it moves a bit, gears grind, the motor hums, and then it stops. I tried poking the emergency button with a paperclip and it opened fully, but still won’t close.

Is there any chance a non-computer savy layperson (me) can repair that with a simple trick - or is it broken? Could so many things be wrong that testing and finding the problem alone would take a lot of time and effort?

repair is not as likely as a soon death, it’s had a long life. see if dust or something is caught on the tray gear teeth. the teeth can wear and cause it to move unevenly and bind up. when pushing the close button gently and evenly push on the tray.

CD drives are usually pretty easy to take apart. A few screws to take off the lid, and the front face usually just clips on and you generally have pretty good access.

It could be one of many things, a few of them are easily repairable. Since a new CD drive is about $15, it’s probably not worth fixing.

There might be something gummed up in the gears - built up dust, general gunk, I’ve even seen where the silicone lubricant they used on the drive’s gears had dried out and turned into little rubbery nubs. That you could probably fix. Get the drive open, clean out the gears with an old toothbrush and it might come back to life.

Another thing that could have happened is the age & stress on the plastic has broken teeth off the gears or the tracks on the tray, and then you’re pretty much boned. Epoxy or CA glue might hold it together for a bit, but it’s probably going to start failing all over the place even if your original fix worked.

The motor that drives the opener might be shot. If that’s the case, chuck it and replace it.

Do you have kids? It could be Dora the Explorer’s missing right arm wedged in there. I speak from experience on this one.

I realize this is probably not the solution you want to resort to right away, but CD drives are very cheap and one of the easier components to replace in a computer. If you can get the case open, it’s just a matter of unscrewing and unplugging the old drive (making a note of where the screws and plugs went), sliding it out, then reverse the process with the new one.

You can get a CD drive on eBay for less the price of an average fast food meal. Just replace it. If even that’s too much if you know a PC geek ask if they have a spare one to give away. They are probably using them to prop open doors.

As long as it closes by hand, why not use it forever? The exercise is good for you as a bonus.

JHC on a pogo stick, just shoot the thing and move on…

Pentium III?

Get a computer ya cheep basterd!!! :smiley:

Some CD drives (not all) have a small drive belt that opens/closes the tray.

With the tray open have a look in the slot and see if there is a small drive belt that is loose or two empty pulleys where a belt should be :slight_smile:

Pushing by hand doesn’t close it; it keeps stuck in a 3/4 open position, and I don’t want to use force lest something plastic breaks off. Since it’s normally done entirely by motor and carefully steering, I think using force is not what the computer wants.

Dust or evaporated lube sound plausible, as it’s not been used for some time (seperate problem is that I just can’t convince the damn system that there is sound, so there was no reason to play CDs yet).

Thankfully, no small children, so at least no plastic toys will be stuck inside.

Sometimes the gearing can get off. So the drive thinks it’s nearly closed when it isn’t etc.

I’ve taken apart a lot of drives over the years, typically to fix problems like this. It isn’t easy to get everything back into the proper configuration. (The coordination between the tray moving in/out and the CD spindle moving up and down has to be just right.) I’ve even given up on some.

Spend the $15.

Since you can easily replace it, that’s specifically why I would go ahead and see if you can fix it. What will it hurt if you completely screw it up?

And, yeah, without the motor, pushing it back in is a bad idea. The reason you can push them back in on most systems nowadays is that, after a little push, the motor kicks in. I’ve tried to slam a drive shut before, and it would always stay a a few millimeters shy of closing, and the computer would not read the disk unless it was 100% completely closed.

I’d offer to send you one of my old CD drives for the cost of shipping, but I think you can probably find it cheaper locally. Just make sure to get one with an ATA connector, not an SATA one. Your old computer probably does not have SATA ports, unless you bought a special card.