Have 3 of these, all were non-working, but I got one going as it only needed some minor stuff like belt, etc. These look like some low-level clone of the CLD-D503 or thereabouts.

However, two others exhibit the same peculiar problem that I have not yet gotten figured out. They both power on but the trays will not open and the laser will not do its search and seek, where it moves back and forth and tries to locate a disc. When I manually open the trays then power on, they'll sit there, and the laser just sits in its position closest to the spindle.

If I push the laser all the way to the back of the unit, then power on, the laser will move forward and the tray will close until the laser reaches its point closest to the spindle again, then both stop. I can redo this action and get the tray completely closed and even down to the load disc position, and that's it.

I'm figuring it's in the laser mechanism somewhere, since it won't do the normal search and seek operation, but not sure what to look for. Anybody have any ideas? Thanks!

My first guess would be a dirty or otherwise malfunctioning microswitch. I had a Pioneer that did this intermittently, & I finally opened it up & cleaned a lot of crud off the inside. I found half a roach in there (a small one), & the other half had apparently been vaporized, or something, & deposited around the machine. Nasty.

Okay, that might be it. Will have to look into that further, though both are clean inside. Here's what I've come up with so far:

The players seem to be stuck in the 'play' mode somehow, since what happens is the laser moves to the inside position, and the tray eventually drops to the play position. But there's no spinning of the disc and there's no searching done by the laser, and no resetting or parking by it either. The players will not respond to the open/close command except to display that command on screen and then go back to play mode status displaying the typical zeroes shown at disc's start. I even tried it with a disc loaded to no avail.

Off/On switch works fine.