"David Farber" wrote in message
...
Andy Cuffe wrote:
I have a Sony DBP-S301 Blu-Ray player with a bad drive. It's
basically a standard IDE Blu-Ray drive. I would like to replace the
drive with a PC BD drive, but it refuses to play any discs, even
though it can at least read them (with the original drive it says "no
disc".

Is this a case of the drive being married to the player, or will it
only work with the specific model drive it originally came with? Most
DVD players that use an IDE drive will work with any computer DVD-ROM
drive.

Does Sony provide any way to marry a new drive to the player outside
the factory? Is there a service menu?
Andy Cuffe



Hi Andy,

I can tell you about a similar problem I encountered with an Alesis
ML-9600 which is a hard disk recorder. The CD player failed to read the
disk. Looking at the drive it appeared to be a standard Sony drive you
would see in any PC. I called Alesis and asked them if I could just put
any CD drive in there. I was sent a list of compatible players for that
unit. The firmware in the machine will only recognize a specific brand of
CD player. I'm guessing that in your situation, the same may hold true.

Good luck.
--
David Farber
David Farber's Service Center
L.A., CA


I agree with David. I'm a bit surprised at your findings that

"Most DVD players that use an IDE drive will work with any computer DVD-ROM
drive"

as over the years, I've found this to be seldom the case on ones that I've
worked on. Most often, the drives, although appearing to be perfectly
standard IDE units from well known manufacturers, are actually OEM versions
that have an additional few bytes of data in their identifier, that makes
them specific to the machine that they are fitted to, and which looks for
that extra info, at boot up.

Arfa