Sega CD restoration/repair tutorial

I bought a broken Sega CD on eBay for about 25 bucks to try to fix it, it was sold as not powering on. If it’s not powering on and there hasn’t been any other attempted repairs then in my experience it’s likely the fuse.


Here is one location of the Model 2 Sega CD fuse.



After replacing the fuse we have successfully restored power and got to the boot screen. I’m trying to get a burned copy of Sonic CD to read and you can hear the laser pick it up, but it’s giving me a no disc error. I opened the console and tried to see if it would read without the top shell by holding on the lid sensor and holding down the metal spindle rod with my finger. It does work this way so something is wrong with the top shell, the magnetic spindle hub/holder I think is the issue.

I removed the hub piece, stuck it ontop of the disc and tried to get it to read and it works fine.



After putting that piece back into the lid and trying to read the disc with my finger on the spindle rod, I noticed it was making contact with the tray. That’s when I realized the laser assembly was sitting too low. I opened the console again and the rubber bushing are what’s keeping it at the proper level, I have seen broken ones before on other systems and these were all broken and just not functioning.

I retook this picture, but it was a little less obvious than this.

Before



After





What I tried was to take the bushings/feet off of a few dead PS1s laser assemblies and it works!







So if you’re having issues like this check out those bits of rubber (you couldn't hear the actual scraping) and a PS1 laser assembly works great as a cheap replacement part if you don’t have a direct replacement.

 

Thanks for the tips! Planning on flipping the system? Not a bad way to make a buck.

 

While the Sega CD is fun; I've already exhausted it's library for the most part. Popful Mail is still one of my all time favorite games. I'm going to replace the BIOS with a region-free BIOS chip then go from there. That's mainly why I got it, to try out this mod. In my experience Sega CDs are rarely dead for any reason besides the fuse so this was new to me. Seems simple once it's fixed, but I couldn't figure it out because there wasn't any audible scraping against the tray, it must have been 1/8th of an inch too low with the broken rubber. It would spin, say press Start like it read but then nothing. Someone at some point in the future will have this issue and hopefully find this thread, so I figured I'd make a write-up.

 

I threw so many of these out that I got for cheap/free in the late 90's all because search engines were horrible and I had no idea what a pico fuse was. Thanks for the tip about the rubbers on PS1 lasers.

 

This is the only type of scenario where I'd suggest reusing rubbers for sure.

The direct replacement for that fuse is actually this one by the way, but that's what I had on hand. I'll be swapping them out soon.

https://console5.com/store/fuse-125v-2-5a-smd-nano-littelfuse-sega-cd.html