First post, by cjreha
Hi folks,
It's been a while since I sat down and played with Wintel-era hardware, but the itch recently came back and I've been scratching it by finally finishing off a nice Pentium III build I started years ago. One of the things I always love doing when putting machines together is finding and using interesting period disc drives, and for this build one of my picks is a Kenwood 72x "TrueX" CD-ROM drive from the height of the drive speed wars. It's kinda-sorta cheating to get that rating, it's not a "raw speed" 72x like you'd normally associate with its disc-shattering contemporaries, it simply uses multiple lasers to read multiple tracks at once while spinning the disc at a much saner speed. It's a drive I'd sought for years, and finally last year found in a box of drives at one of the various VCF swap meets.
Anyway, to get to the point, I plugged it in for the first time today and was met with absolutely nothing. Unfortunately, it's stone dead. Won't even push out the tray, the status LED doesn't light up either. I cracked it open to see if anything was obviously blown up, but unfortunately aside from the usual age-related grime, everything looks fine. I've attached some good photos of the control board for anyone interested. Kenwood were actually fairly nice and silkscreened a basic block diagram of the chips on the board as well as labelling voltage/RF test points, so I was able to confirm the internal voltage rails (10/5/3.3V) are all present and correct. Unfortunately, beyond that, I'm kind of in the dark. As is kind of typical for late-era drives like this, most of the logic is packed into completely unobtainable ASICs, and my current guess is that the main Zen ASIC has failed (P/N L5A9394). It gets uncomfortably hot to the touch after about 15 seconds, while all other chips on the board either remain cold or only get very slightly warm. There are a couple other possibilities floating around in my mind, like the Winbond flash memory having failed or the early 00's SMD caps making it play dead, but I have absolutely nothing to support these hypotheses and will need to do more testing.
My question is, does anyone have any experience at all repairing these drives or at least diagnosing them? They have a fairly crappy reputation for dying in various ways, even when they were new; lots of forum posts talking about how they worked well, but many people needing to RMA them and ultimately going with other drives for reliability. So I may be fighting an uphill battle here... 🙁 If anyone owns a working drive and is willing to evaluate the heat levels of the chips and/or fill in some of my knowledge gaps I would be incredibly thankful as well. I am, of course, also interested if anyone has one they'd want to part with...
If nothing else, I hope this ramble was entertaining to read. If people were interested I'd love to post more often about some of my adventures fixing oddball CD-ROMs, it's been a very long time since I was active on the forum 😀
