Before you totally give up on your favorite recorder or player try this step before chucking it in the closet forever. Symptoms: All of a sudden it stopped recording and or playing my disc's for no apparent reason. Is it broken? Not necessarily. These types of units are optical readers and writers. If the lens, which both reads and writes to becomes excessively dirty then it will exhibit read and write problems with most recordable media from cheap ones as well as supposedly high quality media. I have 2 DVD recorders that I restored back to full functionality simply by partially disassembling the drives and physically cleaning the lens with a simple Q-tip doused with windex. Then to make cleaning them a lot easier later on I remove most of the screws and then simply pop off the 2 main covers 1 for the main housing and 1 for the 1 that covers the drive itself. My suggestion would be to only do this on units out of warranty as in warranty units should be returned for repair/replacement, but units out of warranty would make no difference as in my opinion are not worth the money to fix as newer models are cheaper to buy anyways. My 2 cleaned units are a Liteon 5005 and a Magnavox 10D. Both have been upgraded with firmware, but that itself didn't stop the read and write problems as they were related to dirty laser lenses, and not outdated firmware. Cleaning the lenses various from manufacturer to etc, but generally speaking the cleaning procedure is basically unplugging the unit, removing the main nit cover, then removing the secondary cover that exposes the lens in the drive, cleaning the lens with a Q-tip doused with windex use 1 end wet and then dry the lens with the other tip. Use a soft circular motion to clean and dry the lens then examine the lens closely and repeat if needed. Hope this hint helps get a few more supposedly dead DVD units back into operation again. BNG
not bad....... you know what would be better? take pictures of the procedure and then post step by step instructions! that would be wayyyyyyyy cool!
It would be easy enough to post pictures but there are so many different models out there that require different methods of disassembly. That's primarily why I posted general guidelines. I simply studied the cases of my units and carefully took it apart slowly until I figured it out. The 5005 was the biggest challenge as the first time I partially disassembled it I couldn't get the front cover piece off to remove the drive from the main housing. Months later I had another go at it and discovered that a screw driver has needed to pry off that piece, and finally remove the drive for closer examination. Turns out a set of metal covers on the drive also needed to be removed to access the main plastic cover on top of the drive to expose the actual lens for cleaning. Strangely, it didn't even look dirty upon closer examination. I knew better though and cleaned it anyways. To make cleaning easier again the next time I taped the plastic cover rather then replace the screws and left out the metal covers as well along with the main housing screws. Now all I have to do is pop off the main cover and the plastic cover over the lens and wala cleaning the lens now takes less then a minute to them. The MAG 10D is also prepped in the same way and cleaning is a breeze now. If you really think about it the lens only really needs to be cleaned yearly as that's about how long my units went before developing problems as I recall. So I'd say to anybody that wishes to try this cleaning themselves just take your time and study how your unit is put together and adapt this method to clean the laser lens on a unit by unit basis...BNG
