Hardware Need help! My Wii disk drive isn't working!

[Matt93]

This just ruined my day. I was setting up my Wii, and I lost grip on it and dropped it. I set it up to see if it was okay, and it turns on and works, but now it can't read any disks at all. I go to the Disk Channel and it says "Unable to read the disk." It makes funny noises trying to read a disk when you insert a disk or turn it on with a disk in it. What can I do?

Nintendo will charge $75 for a repair if I send it in to them. Are there cheaper alteratives? How cheap and easy is it to replace the disk drive myself? Should I just let Nintendo do it since I dropped it and there could be other problems, or is it just the disk drive for sure?

Also, I have the Homebrew Channel, the Backup Loader Channel, DVDx, custom IOSs and the like installed on my Wii. If I do send it in to Nintendo, then can I just delete them from the system menu and Nintendo will not see that they have been used? DVDx has its own uninstaller, and I can use Wad Manager to uninstall the Backup Loader Channel, but the HBC has no uninstaller. I guess there is Anytitle Deleter. That would probably be the safest. How would I deal with the cIOSs though? Would it matter to Nintendo?

 

[Distrance]

I don't think Nintendo cares. They probably will just reformat the whole crap and all of it will be gone. Well anyway, you could always say to them it broke on it's own ( if you still have warranty ).. you never know.. It might even succeed >.

 

[Matt93]

I don't have a warranty. If I did I would say that it broke on its own. Now I have to pay $75 if I want to send it in to them.

 

[bozzer123]

say you lost the receipt for it but you definitely know you are still under warranty. It might work

 

[Matt93]

They have my Wii's serial number. They know it isn't under warranty.

 

[Distrance]

I guess you could open the Wii or something and check if everything is okay ? The reader might be out of it's place or something. ( I'm not really sure with stuff like this D: ).. I doubt it can get more broken

... Or, you can just send it to nintendo.

 

[Matt93]

I don't have the tools to open it up. You need a special triwing screwdriver. Is it only for warranty that they won't repair it if it has been opened, or is it for everything?

 

[Distrance]

Of course if you open it, the warranty breaks ( I think ? ), but you said it's already broken. But yeah.. Might save some trouble by just sending it to Nintendo. But since they will most likely get rid of the HBC and everything else.. Just in case, you should delete them yourself if you can.

 

[Matt93]

Alright, so its probably going to Nintendo to be fixed. It sets me back $75, but I get a new 1 year warranty. Still, I can't believe that small of a fall broke the DVD drive. They don't make consoles like they used to. I dropped it about 3 feet onto the carpet! With my old Gamecube you could probably kick the dang thing across the room and it would still work fine!

 

[Matt93]

Should have looked at this link before I picked up my Wii.

The one handed thing didn't work out too well.

Anyway, I'm supposed to get my Wii back in 2 days now.

 

[toastert2003]

Should have looked at this link before I picked up my Wii.

The one handed thing didn't work out too well.

Anyway, I'm supposed to get my Wii back in 2 days now.

Now that is what I call comedy.

 

[Matt93]

Well I got my Wii back last night, and I found some stuff I thought was interesting.

My Wii came back with the same firmware, 3.2U on it, so it isn't true that Nintendo updates every console you send in for repair. I re-hacked it with ease, and everything is working as normal. I guess they only update it if they need to, or if they decide to send you a refurbished Wii instead of repairing yours. Also, there were 2 one minute sessions of Super Smash Bros. Brawl in the gaming logs. This makes sense since they probably used that game to test it after the repair, as Brawl is the only double layer game so far.