First post, by songoffall
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So, almost all of my optical drives at this point were refusing to eject. Some would eject properly if there was a disk inside. Only one Sony CD-RW was fine and a Compaq slot-driven 24x CD-ROM from the Deskpro 2000 that people claim has a 100% failure rate.
Every failed optical drive had the wheel-rubber belt system. The two that didn't fail, didn't. So it was a given that the point of failure was the wheels and rubber belt.
There were several suggestions out there - some claiming that cleaning the drive helps, some claiming that the rubber belt has become loose and boiling it will shrink it to its original size.
Having no success with either method, I concluded there was a systematic failure at work here: the wheels and the rubber wheel didn't get enough traction maybe because they had gathered gunk or the belt had become loose over time, and the trays were adding too much traction especially when closed.
What comes next, if you repeat it, it's at your own risk.
With the drives attached to a computer and the computer on, I used a pin to open the tray. Then I sprayed the wheels and belt with a little 99% isopropyl alcohol because I needed the wheels to be lubricated for what was coming next. Then I dipped a q-tip in alcohol and placed it so it touched both the motor's smaller wheel and the rubber belt. I pushed the tray in a little to trigger the motor. It started to spin and cleaned itself. I dipped a second q-tip in alcohol and placed it on the bigger wheel, so it would also touch the belt. Then I manually pushed the tray in and out as much as I could while holding the q-tip steady, so the gunk on both the wheel and the belt would rub on the q-tip. And I also slightly lubricated the rails of the tray.
Here are my results.
Sony SATA DVD-RW - success
Lite-On IDE DVD-ROM - failure, but this drive seems to have more problems as it doesn't even read disks.
Nec IDE CD-RW - success
Sony IDE CD-RW - failure, even though it worked for a while, returned to the original problem in a few minutes. Might try again
MSI IDE CD-RW - yet to fix
another Sony SATA DVD-RW - yet to fix
Samsung IDE CD-ROM - seems like a partial success - a different issue the drive has suggests the eject button might be faulty, because the drive keeps ejecting at random.
No drives were damaged in the process, but that might just be my luck.
Compaq Deskpro 2000/P2 300MHz/384Mb SDRAM/ESS ES1868F/Aureal Vortex 2
Asus A7N8X-VM400/AMD Athlon XP 2ooo+/512Mb DDR DRAM/GeForce 4 MX440/Creative Audigy 2
Asus P5Q Pro/Core2 Quad Q9400/2Gb DDR2/GeForce 8800GT/Creative X-Fi
