I have a DTL-T10000H The drive wouldn't open. Using parts from salvaged units, I swapped psu, mb, even drive. I still get regardless red light on drive, and tool. Bad cable? I did not swap backplane as I do not have one. Drive switch shows voltage on the lines.
The drive cable is a piece of shit and breaks very easy, if you have a spare cable try it. BTW does the drive make any noise when you press eject?
I tried a known working drive with it's cable. It's something to do with the eject function , as shorting the switch won't work. There's no response at all, nor led light! The only part I did not replace is the backplane, so it has to be something on it.
thats weird, i would never expect something like an eject function to be dependend on the backplane/external hw. in normal curcumstances a drive eject would/should function fine with just power/shorting the switch etc. hopefully parris or somebody else can shed some light on your problem.
The eject function on the Tool is not dependent on any external cabling (other than silver IC), unlike retail drives that have a IC between buttons / LED and drive PCB. I would take the drive to pieces as you mention you are getting no light and make sure internal connections are fine. I would suggest that the first thing to do is ensure power is actually getting to the drive, which is via the piece of shit silver IC (it is the most fragile dumb ass cabling ever) and if it has snags or tears in it you can hopefully either plonk in a spare cable from another unit or use silver pen to create track lines. I've once done this with the help of a keen eyed friend. It worked, but the drawer was opening, just no read capabilities. You may have accidentally reversed that IC cable at the motherboard or on the back PCB of the drive, therefore not making contact (upside down). Linux board shouldn't affect things other than providing power distribution. Check the LEDs at the rear of the Linux PCB to ensure they are all lit green. So, as mentioned before I would suspect either a fubar drive or perhaps the IC from main motherboard to drive. It truly is rubbish.
I have several here near me... they cry your name The drives work fine in the other tool. It's obscene but I have three ps2 tools in pieces testing the one.. I suspect that the ic that gets the signal from the drive has an error... but I swapped the mainboards. No error. Only error is on the backplane, which has tool and drive as red. It must interface with the drive!
Check the CR2032 battery on the mechacon PCB (that's the one the ribbon cable from the drive connects to). Strange things can happen if it is empty. One of my TOOLs (the one with the T14k emulator card) also has problems ejecting the drive tray. After pressing the reset button, the blue LED blinks, but the tray doesn't open; blinking stops after some seconds, just as if the tray was mechanically blocked. It works as it should after letting the system run for a few minutes. No idea what's causing this; all I can say it is not about the battery, as I already exchanged that for a new one some time ago, but the problem remained :shrug:.
Not for me, for the size of these things they are sooo damn fragile it's almost a joke. Shipping them properly is almost impossible, de-re assembly (which is a nightmare of it's own) to fix one issue pops up several new ones and so on.. tools are a nightmare if you ask me. If you buy one and you don't have parris skills to fix it start praying they arrive in 1 piece :thumbsup: in my lifetime I owned 3 from which 2 had to be fixed on arrival and 1 that by miracle arrived totally fine when sold arrived broken at the buyer.. :-( never again!
More like cracked solders on the mechacon board. I've repaired early retail units with similar faults by re-working the DSP chip. I don't know how the DVD drive on a dev unit behaves on fault, but retail does not light the eject (blue) led when there's a fault. Also the boot rom does not finish booting so you get a solid black screen when the OSD tries to start.
Is this the Linux backplane that took the hit (i.e. connector for PCI?) I have never owned an emulation card, so interesting to see that 2 people have experienced that battery drain / drive opening problem. Oh the weird and wonderful world of PS2 Tools. I think that's the reason I love them so much, they fight back! Kev, I would love one, but transport from USA, plus I am a poor student these days may mean it's not happening. I will however share this image as you'll be familiar with the situation. This was me a couple of years back when I was repairing 3 x Tools all at the one time. It was a nightmare. One at a time dear friend, one at a time! Two worked one dead.
Initially when I read the first part of this I thought it must be yet another poor casing issue with PS2 Tool, but the next part about leaving it operating and it opening was interesting especially as confirmed by Unclejun. Does the T14k emulator card drain the battery whilst the unit is switch off? For anyone else facing the annoying tray jamming then it tends to fall into 2 issues. 1) The drive mechanism is actually faulty, misaligned and to avoid damage to the drive motor it reverses and shuts the tray. I.e. it meets resistance caused by a faulty mechanism. 2) The actual PS2 Tool casing fits like a donkey glued to a brick! If you don't align the plastic cover marked TOOL correctly (i.e. get all the teeth into the grooves on the top part just right) then it obstructs the tray just by a fraction and again the drive tray meets resistance and forces the drawer to close again. The annoying thing is you don't tend to notice as it is just a tiny bit out and close the unit up only to have to pull it apart again. I recommend when putting the unit back together again to test the drawer opens and closes before putting all screws into the base and attaching plastic foot. Both are easy to fix. I guess the battery one is straight forward too, but fiddly and means going into the unit. However actually replacing a PS2 Tool drive is a pain as it means taking the unit right back to where the top and side mohawks come off to expose the screws that attach it to the metal frame. I really don't need to be thinking about buying another one of these beasts.
To be honest, I don't think this particular problem is caused by a dead battery. The one in my unit was still at +3V, which should be more than enough for the NVRAM to retain its contents. I believe this is some sort of incompatibility between the T14k and native mechacon which somehow leaves the real drive in a bad state (software-wise). The T14k intercepts the system bus between the IOP and DSP (which also acts as a bridge between the IOP and mechacon), so it could basically cause any kind of drive malfunction imaginable. In my case, there was a bad contact somewhere in this path that caused the Linux system to freeze periodically, as well as prevent the emulator from running at all. In its original state, it would even refuse to load the emulator driver on the Linux side due to this bad contact. In comparison to the drive, the battery is easy to replace; you just need to remove the back plastic cover as well as the emulator and CPU card. By the way, how do you calibrate the laser after replacing it? I think the TOOL has the older drive assembly with auto-tilt motor, but you'd still need to adjust the TORX screw and resistor pots, right? At leasts that's what I did on some retail units (without auto-tilt, so one additional degree of freedom), but I had to use the OSD/Browser to check whether the console would actually read disks. As it usually took me 2 hours to get the pots into a position where both PS1 and PS2 disks work, and the TOOL does not even have a browser to start with, I wonder how to do such testing? Before someone asks: yes, I do know (or at least I think I know) the pinout of the service-mode ports on the mechacon PCB for the official drive and EPROM calibration software, but I am not desperate enough to connect that port to a MAX3323 (yet ).
