Original Xbox disc tray won’t open? Start with a paperclip

A tray that refuses to open is one of the most common faults on a console this age, and it is also
one of the easiest to fix. In most cases nothing is broken: a rubber belt has gone soft and no longer
grips.

First, get it open

With the console switched off, look underneath the drive. There is a small hole there. Push a
straightened paperclip into it and the tray pops open. No force, no tools, no dismantling.

That alone tells you something useful: if the mechanism moves freely by hand, the motor and the
gears are fine and you are looking at the belt.

Clean the belt before you replace it

With the tray open you can see a small belt running over a couple of gears. Lift it off with
tweezers and wipe it with a cloth. Clean the gears with isopropyl alcohol on a cotton bud. Let
everything dry, put the belt back and try the eject button.

This works more often than people expect. A belt that has picked up twenty years of dust and oil
slips; a clean one grips again. It costs nothing and takes five minutes.

If it still will not move, the rubber itself has perished and a new belt is the answer.

Belt sizes differ per drive

Four brands of drive were fitted to the Original Xbox — Thomson, Philips, Samsung and Hitachi —
and they do not all use the same belt. For a Thomson the folded length is 55 mm.
For the others there is no generally published figure, so measure the old belt folded flat before
ordering.

You can tell which drive you have without opening the console by looking at the shape of the tray
front once it is ejected.

Samsung drives in particular are known for needing a new belt; that is their characteristic failure
rather than a laser problem.

Stuck shut instead of stuck open

Different problem, different fix. Try applying gentle upward pressure on the drive while pressing
eject. Once you have it open, leave a disc in the tray when the console is not in use — that keeps
the magnet inside from clamping down as hard.

It opens fine but will not read discs

Then the belt is not your problem. Two things to try, in order.

Clean the laser lens: either with a cleaning disc that has soft bristles, or properly, by opening
the drive and swabbing the lens with isopropyl alcohol of 91% or higher on a cotton bud.

If that fails there is a potentiometer adjustment that increases laser power, but be careful with
it — turn it too far and you will destroy the laser, or your discs. For a Thomson the recommended
lower limit is 800 ohm and you should work in small steps with a multimeter. This is not a
first resort.

Should you just replace the drive?

Often, yes. And here is the part that surprises people: the drives are
interchangeable. You can put a drive from any Original Xbox into any other one, regardless
of which revision it originally came from.

What differs is reliability. Philips and Hitachi drives fail least. Thomson drives — the ones
fitted to the earliest consoles — are the most likely to give you a “dirty disc” error and are the
drive most people end up replacing.

One caveat if you are tempted by a spare PC drive: an ordinary IDE DVD drive will physically work,
but the console will only read burned discs with it, and it will no longer detect a disc or eject
from the dashboard. For everything to behave normally you need a genuine Xbox drive.

Flat cables

Less common, but worth knowing. The flat white ribbon cables inside the drive — the one to the
laser assembly in particular — can tear or corrode. On a Thomson that cable has 20 pins at 0.5 mm
spacing and is 7 cm long. If you need to replace one, count the contacts, measure the spacing and
the length, and order to those numbers.

Which drive do you have?

You can tell without taking anything apart. Eject the tray and look at the shape of the moulded
plastic on the front; the four makes are visibly different.

It is worth knowing because the characteristic failure differs per brand. Thomson drives are the
ones that throw “dirty disc” errors and were fitted to the earliest consoles. Samsung drives are the
ones that typically need a belt. Philips and Hitachi drives fail least often of the four — although
after twenty years, all of them fail sometimes.

Which drive came in which console is a matter of production, not compatibility: Thomson in 1.0
through 1.4, Philips across the whole run, Samsung in anything, and Hitachi only in the 1.6 and
1.6b. That tells you what you are likely to find, not what you are allowed to fit.

Why the drive matters more than you would think

On a standard or softmodded console the DVD drive’s logic board has to be present and working for
the console to start at all — even if you never put a disc in it. It is part of the boot sequence.

On a console with a modchip and a custom BIOS that check can often be skipped, which is why some
modded machines run happily with no drive at all. If your console is unmodified, a dead drive is not
only a disc problem.

Discs that will not read at all

If the tray opens, the disc spins and nothing happens, work through it in this order: clean the
lens, try a different disc, and only then consider the laser adjustment. Burned discs are more
demanding than pressed ones, so a drive that reads originals but not copies is usually a laser that
is on its way down rather than a fault in the console.

Putting it back together

Two things people forget. Route the ribbon and power cables clear of the tray mechanism before you
close the lid — a pinched cable produces exactly the symptoms you just fixed. And do not overtighten
the screws into the plastic bosses; they strip easily on a case this age.

If your screws are already stripped or missing, they are a cheap replacement and worth doing at
the same time as the belt.

Parts for the tray and the drive

From the cheapest fix to the complete replacement.

• DVD Drive Belt — A new belt, for when cleaning the old one is not enough.
• Original Xbox Thomson DVD Drive Replacement — A complete Thomson drive, the type fitted to 1.0 through 1.4.
• Original Xbox DVD Drive Hitachi-LG GDR-8050L — A Hitachi drive — one of the two most reliable makes.
• Genuine Original Xbox DVD Drive Power Cable — The power and control cable between board and drive.
• Original Xbox DVD Drive Bracket — The bracket the drive sits in.
• Original Housing Screws Set — The screws to get the lid off in the first place.