There’s not really much you can do that’s really any different to regular generic electronics repair. Check voltages, check for shorts, check for obviously failed/failing components (typically caps).

The only optical drive specific stuff that you tend to need to look at are possibly tweaking potentiometers to increase laser strength (though be careful, for example tweaking the Xbox 360 DVD laser essentially requires a multimeter to ensure you don’t overdo it, and overdoing it is a case of moving the pot less than 1/32 of a turn), and replacing failing motors and belts.

You might be able to get an oscilloscope onto the output of the laser pickup, like Technology Connections did on Youtube, but that was to find the audio waveform coming out of the DAC.

Shponglefan wrote on 2026-01-16, 16:57:

Does anyone have any suggestions for good resources to learn CD and DVD drive repair? […]
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Does anyone have any suggestions for good resources to learn CD and DVD drive repair?

I've got a whole bunch of old drives with various issues. While I've tinkered a bit with trying to repair these drives, I'd like to learn better approaches to diagnosing and repairing them.

Unfortunately, my favorite retro PC repair Youtube channels don't cover repairing old CD-ROM drives. Searching on Youtube turns a variety of videos of varying quality, most of them not great.

Any advice is appreciated.

With drives that don't work, I've mostly found that taking them apart then cleaning & reseating all the flex cables can often allow the drive to read properly again.
Also on drives without a brushless motor for the spindle, spinning the spindle manually to clear the + - contacts or brushes in the motor has got that working a couple of times.

Most CD drives past 2x speed don't really have problems with operating because of capacitors but earlier drives, the SMD capacitors from that time have often bad seals and have leaked. Lots of 1x and 2x drives need recapping.

When testing, mostly I just plug them into a 12v + 5v source or a picopsu without any IDE connected. Then see if it can spin up and read and/or play a proper audio CD.
For testing IDE, I find it's less effort to use a USB>IDE adapter and test the drive connected directly to my main PC to see what it does - I've only seen a couple of drives dislike the USB bridge.

I found this :
https://yesterware.blogspot.com/2020/10/what- … cal-drives.html