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Can anybody reputable repair an NEC CDR-206(PI) 2x CD-ROM drive for me?

T

tpgb12

Experienced Member
Joined
Jul 10, 2014
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65
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United States
Hi, I have an NEC CDR-206(PI) 2x CD-ROM drive that comes from a PC-9821 Cs2 computer. It worked very well for over a year until now where it just suddenly, for seemingly no reason, started making an awful grinding noise when opening and closing the disc tray. It still read discs fine, but it was incredibly annoying. I tried fixing it myself, but then that just made it worse because now the tray keeps getting stuck on something after I took the top piece with the spindle that holds the disc down off and back on so I could look at the gears. I need this particular drive to be working because it's the only one that can be used on this machine without hacking up the case, etc. Please message me if you have the ability to repair old CD drives like this. I really don't think I can do it myself at this point, since I suck at repairing mechanical stuff. Thanks.
 
Several of my old CD drives started displaying the same symptoms. Upon examination, it turns out that the plastic teeth in the tray rack are stripping out/breaking. If that's the case, your best course may be to replace the drive.
 
If that's the case, then that really sucks. This drive is pretty much impossible to get a replacement of outside of buying a whole other computer, which really isn't worth it. And who knows what shape that one would be in even if I did do that. I hear people online talking about how old hard drives are unreliable and you should use compact flash or whatever, but I haven't had that many issues with them. I've gotta say, I've had worse luck with old optical drives by far.
 
Looking up pictures of the computer, if the drive is standard IDE like I think it is, you should probably be able to find a similar one that will fit in its place
 
The computer's faceplate is made in such a way that this is the only one that will fit correctly with the flaceplate on, and while you can plug in other IDE optical drives, driver-wise you're very limited with what drives can actually be used.
 
With a 3d printer anything is possible, if it's just a standard sort of pc clone you should be able to use generic ide drivers.
 
It's not an IBM PC clone. This is a Japanese computer that was only ever released there. Happens to run variants of MS-DOS and Windows, but not compatible with the same software. It just happens to share some components like the IDE standard. You can't use the same generic IDE CD drivers like OAKCDROM, and as far as I know there are no drivers for it that let you use any IDE CD-ROM drive.
 
Yeah, PC98 platform. Very different at a hardware level (as well as BIOS, etc.).

Standard floppy format is 8x1024 byte track layout. Video is wildly different.

C-bus machines once held 70% of the Japanese PC market. IMOHO, a better technical design that the IBM PC series.

If you're in a hacking mood, I assume that you've seen this. I"ve got a similar problem with a Toshiba tower system.
 
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I'm honestly surprised a 2x CD drive is still working. I've gone through lots of drives over the ages, and they almost always stop reliably reading CDs, just acting all flaky or refusing to work at all. Even with minimal use.

I hear what you are saying about wanting someone to professionally repair it, but if you wind up taking a closer look at it and figuring out what is damaged, you might want to post some photos here and see if anyone has a non-working drive or cheap incompatible drive with similar parts. Something like a gear or the tray might be similar even if the faceplate, mounting, or interface electronics are not.
 
I'll take some pictures tomorrow. Not entirely sure if it's the culprit, but I noticed that one of the gears was actually yellowed and it looked like a bit of it was shaved off.
 
Here's the yellowed gear I was talking about, and notice how some of the teeth look shaved off:

49899331951_ddf8aeecaf_c_d.jpg


And a quick video I shot:
https://youtu.be/octa0jY-xOU

The video lets you hear how it sounds and shows that the top spindle thingy keeps scraping for some reason, and I don't know how to fix that. That sometimes causes a CD to scrape against the tray, but not always. I didn't catch it on video, but the tray also now sometimes either gets stuck or goes in and jumps back out. You see at the end that when that doesn't happen, it still accesses the disc fine. I don't want to put the drive back together until I can at least have that fixed.
 
tpgb12 said:
The video lets you hear how it sounds and shows that the top spindle thingy keeps scraping for some reason, and I don't know how to fix that. That sometimes causes a CD to scrape against the tray, but not always. I didn't catch it on video, but the tray also now sometimes either gets stuck or goes in and jumps back out. You see at the end that when that doesn't happen, it still accesses the disc fine. I don't want to put the drive back together until I can at least have that fixed.
Click to expand...

It's likely that the reason the top spindle is scraping is because the bottom spindle isn't lifting high enough after the tray closes. In the drives I've looked at, it's almost always because the tray is not closing with enough force (there seems to be some momentum needed to get the bottom spindle to 'kick' up properly).

I would bet that gear does have something to do with it.
 
So, you're basically saying that if the gear was replaced perhaps this whole thing would be fixed? Issue is that I don't have a 3D printer (unless you can somehow buy that gear somewhere) or any knowledge on how to change gears.
 
tpgb12 said:
So, you're basically saying that if the gear was replaced perhaps this whole thing would be fixed? Issue is that I don't have a 3D printer (unless you can somehow buy that gear somewhere) or any knowledge on how to change gears.
Click to expand...

I can't be 100% confident, but I would bet it's slipping on those ground down teeth and not closing with enough force to fully lift the spindle.
 
I would go to a university, one that has an engineering department or industrial design/fabrication, they might have the right equipment. You could make it from scratch in CAD, but the easiest way would be a 3D scanner, you could then correct the scan for the deficiency in the gear, then 3D print it.
 
Chuck(G) said:
The uniqueness of this NEC model seems to be the tray front and the position of the eject button. Would say, a CDR-250 work?
Click to expand...

I don't know, and I don't know if anyone's made a full list of compatible drives with this model driver-wise. Something I might try out soon is that I do have a 4x NEC Multispin drive in my NEC Ready 7022 PC (one of my first posts on the site, and I did eventually get it working if anyone is curious). I could take it out temporarily and see if I can at least get it to work as far as drivers go.
 
Okay, scrap that. Tried the 4x drive briefly and it wouldn't post, and the CD audio cable the CDR-206 uses is totally different to this 4x drive. Honestly, I'm tempted to just put the flakey 2x drive back together and put it back in the machine again.
 
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