Help! My Turbo CD won't load most of the time, but does sometimes

[JohnRiggs]

For a while, I thought it stopped working all together, but then it worked for a moment. Now it's back to 'Just a Moment' and nothing happens.

I recently got a TurboGrafx CD, the TurboGrafx-16 part works perfectly, but the disc doesn't load. I have a CD card in place - the disc spins and all the lights come on, it displays PC on the LED. It just says 'Just A Moment...' and nothing happens on all the discs I tried.

I cleaned the lens with drop of rubbing alcohol, tried again and my Exile game started, only the graphics were super-glitched. I cleaned the lens and it loaded up to the title screen. In my excitement, I tested out a few of the other games I have, all were super CDs so they would go as far as 'You need a Ver. 3 card' or whatever they would say.

This morning, I went back to my TurboGrafx CD and I'm back to the 'Just A Moment...' with nothing loading. Disc spinning - not sure if the laser moves or not, though. The disc doesn't spin past that first speed. The times it loaded it sounded like the speed picked up a notch.

Any guesses? Any clues? Easy to fix or can someone help fix?

[Keith Courage]

It sounds to me like 3 possible problems.

First thing I would try is adjusting the potentiometers in the drive. Sometimes they can need readjustment one way or the other to get things running just right again.

2nd, could be that some of the capacitors in the drive could be going bad so they would have to be changed.

3rd, The lens itself could be on the way out but after a bit of warm up starts to work again.

[JohnRiggs]

Pardon my ignorance as I'm new to self-fixing, but eager to learn, but what's a potentiometer?

[Keith Courage]

They basically look like volume knobs on the inside. Here is a pic. http://i200.photobucket.com/albums/aa150/boostedk20a/Laser%20guide/pic_06.jpg

[Drakon]

I bought a fat ps2 that was in the same boat as what you have going on.  Games were barely loading due to the laser being on its last legs.  I opened it up and played with the pots and all that did was put it out of its misery.  Thank goodness for freemcboot and openps2loader.

[JohnRiggs]

I'll test those p-meters tonight. I opened it up last night, the gears seems clean, no breaks, cracks or grinding. I cleaned up a bit of the inside and got Exile to play up until it went to the first side-scrolling mission - then it was in forever-load so I turned it off. Trying again tonight.

[JohnRiggs]

@Keith Courage, I can't thank you enough. The issue was absolutely those potentiometers! I twisted them about a fifth of a turn clockwise (not sure what I was doing) and the disk wouldn't spin at all where it did before. I turned them back to where they were (about where they were) and now all my disks load up without any problems what-so-ever!

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

[Keith Courage]

If you ever have to adjust them in the future it is best to try one at a time and then see what happens. That way you can narrow down from process of elimination which one was the problem and then how far to actually turn it. Usually if these need adjusting at all a slight turn is all that is needed.

[JohnRiggs]

Do you know which does what?

[thesteve]

far right is focus error, far left is tracking error.
dont remember the rest