Is it possible to repair a Blu-Ray burner that no longer reads DVDs?

A

athenian200

Gawd
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Mar 29, 2012
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I have this Blu-Ray burner that can no longer read DVDs, and I confirmed it was a hardware problem. It can still playback Blu-Ray discs, but I have a huge library of both software and movie DVDs and that is unfortunately a deal breaker. I wound up having to replace the Blu-Ray player with a DVD-RW drive that I had lying around.

So I'm just wondering, can those drives be repaired when they develop issues that prevent them from reading DVDs? It reminds me a lot of an issue I had on a PS2 I once owned, where it suddenly wasn't able to play PS1 games anymore but still worked fine with PS2 games. I'm starting to think that a lot of optical drives develop random issues that prevent the reading of media smaller than what they are rated for very early in life. The thing is, it's not even a very old drive... I bought the Blu-Ray burner in 2021, and it was manufactured December of 2020. So it lasted a little over a year.
 
The DVD laser is dead. You will more then likely need to replace the entire laser assembly. Good luck trying to find parts for a random PC blu-ray burner. You better off just buying a new one.
 
Susquehannock said:
Just to cover all bases. Have you re-installed the device firmware? Has fixed similar issues for me in the past.
Click to expand...
Yeah, I did try that, and also tried downgrading the firmware because apparently it got silently upgraded earlier this year, and I wasn't even asked if I wanted to do that. I suspect that the firmware update might have played a role in bricking it, and that the update I was fed wasn't intended for my drive but a similar model and threw a bunch of parameters out of whack.

But downgrading it didn't help. It was working fine and then failed and started making weird noises right while I was in the middle of burning a DVD-R. Ever since the failed DVD-R burn it makes these weird clicking noises every time it tries to read a DVD and then fails to read it.

All I know is, I paid $50 for a drive only to have it basically die in a year, and this really seems like a premature failure to me.
 
If there's no warranty (or warranty is too big of a hassle to deal with), you can try cleaning the lens. It might help, or not, but it's not usually too hard to get to with a q-tip and some isopropyl.
 
I remember back in the day I used to sell tons of those little CD cleaners that was a disc with some brushes glued to it. You'd go to track 4 or whatever and that's where the cleaning happened.

Or you can do this: http://www.adrianandgenese.com/blog...make-a-cd-lens-cleaner-for-your-dvdcd-player/

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toast0 said:
If there's no warranty (or warranty is too big of a hassle to deal with), you can try cleaning the lens. It might help, or not, but it's not usually too hard to get to with a q-tip and some isopropyl.
Click to expand...
That could be the issue, I do remember the disc looking "dirty" after being in the drive for some reason, like there was some weird residue on it. I just checked the warranty on the site... and it has a warranty of exactly one year. So it failed pretty much EXACTLY when the warranty was up, and also suspiciously close to the automatic firmware update I don't remember approving.

https://www.newegg.com/lg-wh16ns40-internal-blu-ray-burner/p/N82E16827136269?Item=N82E16827136269

In case the link gets redirected to Amazon, it's an LG WH16NS40. And apparently I paid $64 for it originally, and the price has gone up to $70.
 
With the name Lucky Goldstar, it kind of implies you have to be lucky to make use of it.
 
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