Sony Blu-Ray player drive replacement

Hi Andy,

I can tell you about a similar problem I encountered with an Alesis ML-9600 which is a hard disk recorder. The CD player failed to read the disk. Looking at the drive it appeared to be a standard Sony drive you would see in any PC. I called Alesis and asked them if I could just put any CD drive in there. I was sent a list of compatible players for that unit. The firmware in the machine will only recognize a specific brand of CD player. I'm guessing that in your situation, the same may hold true.

Good luck.

I've had success marrying a LiteOn PC DVDRW/DL to a LiteOn stand alone DVD recorder but the replacement was highly similar to the defunct drive. I'm sure the drives firmware plays a role as I reused that board off the failed drive. The actual servo/laser electronics board for the new drive was not exchanged. Here are a few pics at the bottom of the page and on the second page.

I have a suspicion that this is like the Playstation 3 where the drive's serial number is programmed into the player, and it will only work with the original drive. I'm sure there's a simple way to reprogram the player, but does anyone know if it's something Sony allows servicers to do, or if it's a secret? Does the service manual say anything about drive replacement?

I'm sure I could find an exact replacement drive, and swap the boards (assuming the original board is good), but it's not worth the cost. I would like to just use a PC drive, like I've done so many times with DVD players and recorders. Andy Cuffe

snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com

I'd be doing some reading at the doom9.or and videohelp.com sites. What you may end up doing some firmware flashing. There are a lot of unique firmware tools where you can actually edit the code to suit your needs and cross platorm flash but you'll have to do some research first.

I have been keeping an eye on things, but so far, very little hacking has been done to Blu-Ray players. The manufacturers (particularly Sony) are doing a MUCH better job of locking the players down that they did with DVD.

All this speculation could be answered in a minute with a peak at the service manual. Andy Cuffe

snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com

Well, forget that. I did another search for the service manual, and found a pdf here:

It's 4 pages long, and the only thing it tells you is how to eject a disc if it won't power on. I guess it's non-serviceable... Andy Cuffe

snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com

I agree with David. I'm a bit surprised at your findings that

"Most DVD players that use an IDE drive will work with any computer DVD-ROM drive"

as over the years, I've found this to be seldom the case on ones that I've worked on. Most often, the drives, although appearing to be perfectly standard IDE units from well known manufacturers, are actually OEM versions that have an additional few bytes of data in their identifier, that makes them specific to the machine that they are fitted to, and which looks for that extra info, at boot up.

Arfa

That's where the firmware hacks come into play. I was able to hack an XBox 360 drive to read games inside a PC. You can imagine why I did that.

I guess I've been lucky then. The few times I've tried it, it has worked fine, even on a Sony DVD recorder.

I did manage to come up with a solution to this problem. I have a pile of Playstation 3 parts, including a couple of drives. The drives are completely different, but I found that they use the same optical pickup as this player. I swapped the pickup into my bad drive, and now it seems to be reading discs fine. Andy Cuffe

snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com