Restoring a thrashed Plextor SCSI CD-ROM drive #VintageComputing
Matt’s Tech Pages posts their repair of a rather overused and non-operational Plextor CD-ROM.
Recently I purchased a Plextor PX-40TSi SCSI CD-ROM drive from eBay. It was described as being in “excellent” condition and unusually it came with all of the retail packaging, manual & accessories which was re-assuring.
This is because they are commonly found in older non-PC industrial, professional audio, electronic/RF and medical equipment which is still in use and valuable.
When I unboxed this unit, I quickly noticed the plastic around and on the eject button was noticeably worn. This drive has clearly had a lot of use. I plugged it in, pressed eject and the tray came out with a horrendous grinding noise. It was also apparent that it was full of dust, dirt and even quite a lot of hair. Yuck!
With the tragic 2019-nCov outbreak in China likely to leave me without the PCBs for my next project for quite a while – this has left tech-time a little aimless to say the least. What more can one do than spend some of that time to see if I can bring this thing back to life while we wait and hope for the best.
Opening up the drive found a number of issues that were correctible with some hard work.
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