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Repairing the XBOX 360 DVD Drive

This short guide will help you fix the DVD drive on your XBOX 360 with out dishing out hundreds of dollars for a new 360 or repairs. I'm writing this guide because of my personal experience with my Xbox 360 that broke. I figured that if it happened to me, it's probably happened to a lot of people.

I want to first start out by stating that I'm not an expert electronics repairman, and this particular fix requires very little technical skill. With that said, I'll tell you what brought apon this whole ordeal that I had with my 360. I'm going to first tell you how it broke in the first place so you can compare your symptoms with mine to see if this might work for you before you start to disassemble your 360. I also want to mention that this problem happened with less than 40 hours on my Xbox.

The problem started after playing a game for about an hour. After removing the game and placing another game in the DVD tray, I proceeded to close the drive. This is when things started to turn south. Upon closing the drive, the 360 began omitting horrific grinding and clunking sounds. Fearing that my game was being scratched, I immediately ejected the disc. The disc was not damaged, but once I tried placing the game in the console, the system would not read it. Thinking that it was the game, I began to test every game I had. I kept getting the same results. "Disc Unreadable".

This is when I started to get real worried. I noticed that when inserting a disc into the console, it wouldn't even spin up. (No slight vibrating was felt when a game typically loads.) Occasionally after many tries, I would hear that awful grinding sound. So with all hope lost, and my unwillingness to pay for a expensive repair bill, I began disassembling my 360. I found a terrific guide here: http://www.anandtech.com/systems/showdoc.aspx?i=2610

The most time consuming part of this fix was taking apart the 360, since Micro$oft had to make it hacker resistant :P. Please read the guide for taking apart the 360 before continuing with this guide.

Once you have your 360 apart. Remove the DVD drive. This is the simplest part to remove. Just a couple of screws, SATA cable, and power cable.

After you have the DVD drive removed, you need to take off the outer case of the drive. I believe that there were 4 screws holding it together.

Once I removed the case to the drive, I was in for a big surprise. There was a little magnet stuck to the top of the metal drive case.

This little round magnet did not belong there, it belonged on the DVD drives motor. (See below).

I first thought that I could just put it back, but the buffer on top of the DVD drive case is magnetized, and once I put the drive together, the little round magnet stuck to the buffer. So what could I do to fix this...

Solution: A $1.50 for tube of super glue! I placed a small amount of glue on the side of the round magnet that had 3 little plastic circles tabs (which I'm assuming broke off) and a very small amount of glue in the slot the the magnet fits into. When placing the magnet back on to the motor, I had to be careful about the orientation, because the little round plastic pieces broke off at slightly different lengths. What I did was quickly rotate the magnet around the motor until I felt it click in. Give it about 15 minutes to set and dry, then reassemble your Xbox.

I'm not sure if this is a common problem, but in my case it worked and my Xbox 360 has been working great ever since. So if you think this has happened to you, it's worth a shot. It should be a last resort option. It's definitely better than spending money to have it sent in for repair or worse, buying a new Xbox.

Good luck and happy gaming,

Brandon

 


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