Bad_Ad84

I deal with a lot of Wii's - mostly bought from ebay... I tend to stick to black screen/bricked ones as I'm able to debrick them then I can sell everything in the Wii as parts and make a nice profit. However, there seems to be a lot more "can't read disk" faulty machines than black screened.

Although this means the motherboard will be fine (in most cases), this means theres less to sell (drive is broken) and also, the motherboards do not sell as well as drives. I assume this is because drives are easier to replace and easier to diagnose for the average DIY'er.

Today, I got a few drives with some weird errors, so I decided to do some investigation...

I have some drives that didn't spin up... now I've been doing this long enough to know you never assume anything.

So first thing to do was test the DVD PCB's separately from the chassis, this will tell you which half is broken.

The results were strange... switching over to a known working pcb caused the drive to spin again... this means the problem wasn't the motor but was on the actual PCB itself.

It seems that the Wii isnt detecting the disk and therefore isnt spinning, so after doing some investigation of datasheets and some googling I found theres a chip on the pcb "AN22023" this is a chip made by panasonic that detects media presence and directs the optical pickup to read the disk... This sounds exactly like my issue.

I removed this chip and replaced it with one from a board with another fault and... SUCCESS.

I will update with pictures when i get chance.


Now I just need to figure out whats causing this other board to spin the drive at max speed constantly...