DTS-6 XM3401B CDROM drives repair video

[Marco Giustini]

I still have an old DTS-6 with the caddy drives. They are all more or less dead, they work when they want.

A friend posted a video where he tries to repair one. Lots of pointers if any of you would like to dive into a repair to keep the player alive with the original drives!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDHHSOQ4TdQ

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

A friend posted a video where he tries to repair one. Lots of pointers if any of you would like to dive into a repair to keep the player alive with the original drives!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDHHSOQ4TdQ

But will the old drives work with the current firmware??? I seem to remember doing firmware and a board upgrades when we started installing drawer type drives.

[Marco Giustini]

they do

And those old drives did not have any custom firmware at all

The upgrades were likely because the replacement drives were incompatible with the old SCSI controller. The new controller had bigger software drivers which required a bigger ROM etc.
My DTS-6 is running TCR 1.46

[Michael Zarits]

This just came right on time! I still have a DTS-6 with caddy drives in use and will recap them soon since one of them had troubles reading a disc the last days. Thanks for sharing Marco!

[Marco Giustini]

Very welcome! I never thought of recapping them - I know that recapping is not always the magic recipe to fix things but I've always noticed that those drives start working (or work better) after a while they've been powered up and that is definitely a "bad capacitor" symptom!