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How do I take apart and clean a CD Drive?

G

Gilby

Senior member
My CDRW burner started acting squirrly back this past summer. Problems reading, failed burns, etc. Not something I wanted to bother with at the time so I bought a new one. However...the old one is still sitting in my closet (so is one that had a CD explode in it, for that matter.) As I'm assuming that the problems were likely caused by the drive getting dirty, and it's no big whup if I mess something up, I want to clean it and put it in a new (old) system. I've heard that drive cleaner discs are rough on lenses and, anyway, they cost money. Instead, I'm looking to take the thing apart to clean it.

But my google searching has turned up nothing in the way of guides, just some people mentioning that they had done it. Anyone have any pointers or, better, a link to some sort of guide?

Thanks.
 
What is better?

Spending some money on cd cleaner disk
or
Buying a new cd?

Yeah - some people say they clean their cd rom - I took one apart some time ago just out of interest, what a complete bastard it was to put it back together again
 
Um. I did buy a new drive. Now I'm trying to recover the old one before throwing it out. And lense cleaner discs are (supposedly) not very gentle on the lenses. And the drive that had a disc shatter inside it will definately need to be taken apart to have any hope of being fully cleaned. I'm just asking if anyone knows of some good info.
 
I did take apart a CD drive and put it back (and it still worked). Also, when I painted my CDRW black I had to unmount a few things out of it (the front bezel, the tray)
You can unscrew the 4 small screws that keep the metal plates together. Take the plates apart (there might be other screws). Take the front bezel out and then the tray - this stays in place thanks to an elastic segment of the tray.
You should have now access to the lenses. Air clean the space between lense and laser diode. You can also clean the exterior face of the lense (the up face) or just wipe it with a very soft cloth that leaves no flues.
Put it back again.

This would be all. My CDRW works fine now, and a CD drive that I unmounted to clean its lenses worked at least as good as before. As long as you don't try to "repair" something more, you should be fine.
However, burn errors might appear from mechanical reasons (like vibrations in the disc or laser assembly)

Calin
 
I used some dry things. I think it was the "cloth" from the interior of the floppy disks. If you have ever sacrified a floppy disk, you might already know.

Calin
 
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