I recently purchased an Xbox from eBay afflicted with the Red Rings of Death, in hopes of repairing it. While it ends up the console itself was beyond repair, I had hoped to at least salvage the DVD drive, if not other parts from the console.

I figured my hopes were dashed when I hit the eject button on the DVD drive and nothing happened, aside from a short whirring of motors. Upon taking the drive apart, I found that someone had drawn a big “X” on the drive tray with a Sharpie marker – at this point, I was pretty sure this broken Xbox would yield nothing useful other than some spare capacitors.

Eventually, I noticed that a gear and belt was missing from the drive assembly, and I figured that this was the cause of the tray not opening. You can see the two missing parts highlighted in the image below:

[Image from Llama.com]

The belt is connected to the motor at the front of the DVD drive, which is also connected to the gear that I was missing. This gear drives the larger tray gear on the left, allowing the drive to open and close.

I opened up a bricked hitachi I had laying around in hopes of pulling the gear and belt from that drive and transplanting it into this one. Unfortunately, the gear from the Hitachi drive was not only too tall, but a little different in design as well. It was pretty clear that it would not be a suitable replacement.

Looking around some more on Llama’s site, I found the image below as part of a writeup on Xbox 1 DVD drive disassembly.

As you can see, the drives are laid out in similar fashion, which would be expected as they are both manufactured by Samsung.

I dug up a DVD drive from an old original Xbox I had lying around and took apart the drive. I pulled the gear and belt, but much to my chagrin, the gear was too tall for the Xbox 360 drive. So, I decided to go out to the garage and see what a hacksaw could do about that. I ended up cutting about half a centimeter off the bottom of the gear, then I filed it flat to ensure good movement in the drive. I popped the gear into place, put the belt on, and crossed my fingers.

Much to my surprise, the fix worked like a charm! The drive opened and closed smoothly, and I went from a complete loss to a working drive in just minutes.

I don’t know how often this sort of thing happens to people out there, but I figured it might help someone who took their drive apart and either broke something or lost some parts.

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