PS2 - Broken laser cable slot on mainboard

Well... This sucks. On the lighter part of the connector that is attached to the mainboard, the right edge that holds the darker piece in place has broken off, so there's no way to reliable (and barely unreliably) attach the cable. The darker piece is fine so replacing that wouldn't help.

Any ideas?

I'm not skilled enough to desolder/solder all 32 pins (or whatever it is) on the mainboard. :/ A solution with a permanently attached cable would be fine as long as it's reliable.

It's a GH-023 board, v9 I think. SCPH-50004.

Thanks!

 

The cable should still go in, it's just the clamp that's broken. So find a way to secure the cable in place. Tape, glue - you choose. Or get someone to replace the socket. Or replace the whole board.

 

Thanks! I actually just tried a bit more and managed to squeeze the darker part on (like you normally would, just 1000x more difficult), it seems the piece that had broken off doesn't do anything once the clamp is closed... Sorry for your time

 

Glad you got it sorted, then!

 

I was going to mention that, but yes, you're fine ! Grats on figuring it out yourself !

 

Thanks Too bad there seems to be something else wrong with the mainboard as well (known working laser just clicks and wont read neither CD nor DVD). Maybe not surprising, when I got the machine, all the screws that clamped the cooling to the mainboard were missing and the cooling pad on one of the BA chips had fallen off... Well well... :/

 

This board uses SANYO chips (LA, LB) not ROHM (BAxxxx) and the LA6507 chip has weak outputs on the lens coils driver. Usually a crash accident with the mechacon chip (DVD drive control MCU) causes the lens drive to me left driven at maximum corrent to a extended amount of time. That leads to a enamel meltdown which in turn shorts the coil.

It's usually the tracking coil which burns first. The overcurrent from the short circuit eventually causes the LA6507 to fail.

Only fix is replace both the optical pickup and the LA6507 chip.

 

Thanks for the info! I've heard about this before but not this detailed.

If the problem you described, how would this appear when reading the disc? No light? No focus? Would there be damage to chips or laser that I can see visually? If the laser goes first, does that mean I should not try the laser that came with this machine in another machine?

In my case, the laser homes, there's red light, there's focusing which I think succeeds, it's after that that the weirdness begins. Laser sits still neer the hub, shining solid, sharp light on the disc. Then the disc spins with different speeds (the hub motor repeatedly accelerates/waits for the speed to drop/accelerates/again and again). Usually this goes on for a while until there's the disc read error. Sometimes, rarely, it actually manages to read CD-A discs and the number of tracks on it, but then the same problem occur when trying to play a track.
There are actually a few other things that have happened but I do belive they stopped happening when I replaced the old flex cable connecting the laser to the mainboard - the original one had visible damage AND it was not properly seated! :O

Also, I've noticed that at some times, the disc does not spin AT ALL, it just "jerks" a little bit - but if I give the disc a little help, pushing it by hand... it immediatelly starts to spin at a proper speed and proceeds to fail as above...

Now while writing this summary, I think trying another hub motor is a good place to start (I have a spare), maybe the problem is the disc failing to accelerate to "full" speed after detecting the disc and getting focus on it?

Also all the calibration of the azimuths in the drive assembly was competely messed up so I've done some amateurish re-calibration trying to mimic that of another 5000x. So all this might be a calibration issue as well :/ (EDIT: I'm talking about the big plastic adjustments screws etc, touching the laser pots is the last thing I ever try)

 

Well, the drive needs the tracking coils to be able to jump tracks within the disc. I suppose that would explain why it can focus but not finish identifying the disc.

Edit:

As a quick hint, if it still get to identify a audio CD sometimes, take a known working laser and fit on the unit. If the working laser makes it work then you know the LA6507 isn't blown yet. DON'T ever try a bad laser on a known good console, you risk frying it's laser coils driver chip.

And finally if you have a ohm meter, you can measure the coils impedance. They should measure something around 5 ohm each (there's two coils, one for focus and one for tracking). Blown coils measure for 3 ohm or less.

 

Hmm, ok. I have actually already tried with a working laser, and I got pretty much exactly the same problems. The laser was my first suspect so that's the first thing I replaced. In fact I tried two different lasers, one which is known to read CDs well but is unable to read DVDs (so a broken dvd eye or laser I assume), then one which is known to read both CDs and DVDs ok. Similar problems with all of them...

So the suspects I have is:
* broken LA chip or otherwise damaged mainboard
* bad hub motor
* bad calibration of guide rails etc
* all my lasers have died

Since I can try another hub motor *relatively* easy I'll start with replacing that even if it's not the most likely cause. Or any other suggestions?

I do have an extra GH-023 mainboard to try as well, but that machine doesn't boot (fan/lights, but no audio/video output) so I'm not sure how hard that machine will attempt to read the discs...

 

The black screen problem is usually caused by shorted resistors on the address lines of the IOP CPU

 

I see, testing/repairing that is probably beyond my skills, just like replacing the LA chip is if that's bad I have parts enough to build about 1½ 5000x so I really hope at least this one board works so I get at least one machine working, and will sell/give away the other one as spares.

It'll take a while before I can try the other hub motor and see if that makes a difference, I'll update once I've done that!

Thank you so much for your help, I really appreciate it!

 

Good news - it turns out it was the spindle motor!

I noticed that except for the issue I noticed above - that the disc would sometimes not spin unless given a push - it also had problem stopping the disc, such as when pushing Eject when the disc was spinning fast would not make the spindle motor brake the disk, just stop spinning it, so it would take ages for it to lose all momentum.

I replaced the motor with one from another 50004 and now the machine reads everything

 

The brake mechanism works through shorting the driver transistors with a pulse on a special "brake" pin which in turn causes the driver transistors to connect the three spindle motor pins and the auto induction this new "circuit" generates cause the motor to stop a lot faster than if it's left alone. So since the brake mechanism is independent from the driver mechanism it's possible to have a driver chip which can spin discs but not stop correctly. In your case it probably has one of the three pins disconnected from the current driver so it can't spin correctly (hence you need to push it forward so it can get started spinning) and it certainly won't be able to stop.

While the motor uses only three lines of that flatcable the other connections are for a set of HAL effect elements which detect the spindle rotation. If any of these elements are broken, the driver won't be able to control the correct speed of the disc and the console will have a hard time reading discs.

I once had a PS2 which could not stop the disc and in my case it was the driver chip, not the motor.

 

I see... Since using another motor+cable worked fine I am assuming the driver is OK, unless the problem comes back... The cable to the motor was pretty brused, so I wouldn't be surprised if that one is bad... Since the other machine which I stole the working motor from is basically a scrap heap I wont bother trying to fix this motor at this point...

Thanks again for all the info!