Repair Pioneer BDR-XD08UMB-S

[mlindstrom]

My Pioneer BDR-XD08UMB-S had been working great for about 15 months. Yesterday I was trying to play Sonic 2 and struggling with getting an updated keydb file, when it stopped working altogether. No lights, won't open disc bay when I click but, no drive detected at all in Windows.

Any suggestions for repairing it myself, or would anyone want it for parts, or want to try repairing it for me and keep it for parts if they can't figure it out?

I took off the mainboard and don't see any obvious damage. I could swap out parts, but that would mean buying a whole new drive, and the new ones come with non-libredrive firmware.

I'm guessing the laser and mechanisms are still fine and there's just something wrong with the USB power.

[MartyMcNuts]

My Pioneer BDR-XD08UMB-S had been working great for about 15 months. Yesterday I was trying to play Sonic 2 and struggling with getting an updated keydb file, when it stopped working altogether. No lights, won't open disc bay when I click but, no drive detected at all in Windows.

Any suggestions for repairing it myself, or would anyone want it for parts, or want to try repairing it for me and keep it for parts if they can't figure it out?

I took off the mainboard and don't see any obvious damage. I could swap out parts, but that would mean buying a whole new drive, and the new ones come with non-libredrive firmware.

I'm guessing the laser and mechanisms are still fine and there's just something wrong with the USB power.

Did you try a different USB cable and/or USB port?
Have you tried using a power supply for it? I'm pretty sure it has the hole for it.

[mlindstrom]

Thank you for the suggestions!

Tried a different USB cable and a different computer, too.

The drive does have a hole for a power supply, but I do not have an appropriate power supply for testing that. The https://usa.pioneer/products/dca-003 is 5V / 3A / center-positive, but I'm unsure of the barrel jack size. The BDR-XD08UMB-S manual says it actually only needs 1A, but again I'm not sure of the barrel size.

I suppose I could contact Pioneer Customer Support at 1-800-421-1404 and see what they say, but I'm guessing they charge a lot and would update the firmware without hesitation.

[Yethidran]

if you have a Windows desktop computer, i can suggest that you unscrew the side panel of the computer to get access to a spare sata cable, and spare power cable that comes out from the computer power supply unit.
then open up your external pioneer drive casing to take the drive out and connect it directly to the desktop computer. (so as not to use the external USB connection)
if this method of direct connection to your computer and it still cant recognize the drive, then i would safely say that the drive is dead.

[Billycar11]

if you have a Windows desktop computer, i can suggest that you unscrew the side panel of the computer to get access to a spare sata cable, and spare power cable that comes out from the computer power supply unit.
then open up your external pioneer drive casing to take the drive out and connect it directly to the desktop computer. (so as not to use the external USB connection)
if this method of direct connection to your computer and it still cant recognize the drive, then i would safely say that the drive is dead.

sadly these drive have no internal sata connection they are pure usb drives

[Yethidran]

oops, i just google searched this drive and now realized how the drive looks like. yup, gonna be impossible to do anything about it. sorry.

[Yethidran]

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005 ... 1802dQsTle

if the drive was removable from the casing, the link attached above, "adapter" would come in handy.

[mlindstrom]

Thanks for the suggestion, but no I don't see any sata connector when opening.

[Coopervid]

Thanks for the suggestion, but no I don't see any sata connector when opening.

If you have an external HDD or a powered USB hub I'm pretty sure that power supply would fit your Pioneer drive. If that doesn't help it's most likely dead.

[mlindstrom]

I looked around the house and found four power adapters with barrel plugs for an external HDD, thunderbolt dock, LED lamp, computer, and network switch, but voltages are 3V, 12V, or 20V. None are 5V. They're all mostly different sizes too, I didn't actually check every one but I think they're all too big.

Thank you for that suggestion, too!

[dcoke22]

If you don't mind random Chinese brand X, Amazon has pretty inexpensive barrel jack power supplies with multiple sizes of barrels.

https://www.amazon.com/Universal-Adapter-Converter-Inverter-Transformer/dp/B09NLMVXMZ

[mlindstrom]

Bought a power supply and compatible jack to test whether that works, and still no dice.

Also called Pioneer, and they said they don't repair any drives. If it were still under warranty, they would just sent me a totally new one.

Bought an LG BP50NB40 and successfully got it flashed, so will be using that for now I guess. Hopefully I don't find discs that need a Pioneer anytime soon, guess nothing to do but wait and see.

[zittrig]

Buy a used Verbatim 43888 with a pioneer drive inside. Worked with 4k out of the box. Then you've a 2nd drive for difficult discs. So I've done. Discs which my ASUS BW-16D1HT don't like get my Verbatim. But until now there are not a lot of them, knocking on wood.

[compucat]

Pardon the necropost, but I experienced the same failure. I pulled the main PCB and threw some diagnostic time at it; the following are my collected notes so far.

- Drive's internal structure is fairly straightforward. Renesas R8J32740FP42 controller, connected via a Fujitsu MB86C311B USB/SATA bridge, plus a TI MC3220 USB-C mux and some jellybean voltage regulators.
- The bridge also has an attached SPI flash - presumably for configuration.
- When drive fails, following symptoms present:
- Drive does not enumerate over USB, whether 3.0 or 2.0. (USB 2.0 lines bypass the USB-C mux, thus exonerating it.)
- As noted, eject request button does not trigger eject solenoid. (Hints at a bad drive controller, I think? Unless the controller refuses to eject disc without a SATA link...)
- Probing the PCB, internal 5V, 3.3V, and 1.2V rails all look good. (The last one is not broken out to a test pad - I used a via next to the MB86C311B.)

Based on this, my current suspicion is that both the controller and bridge IC are simultaneously dead? Not confident on that conclusion, however. The SATA traces are easily accessible - when I get time, next diagnosis step is to try hooking that up to a known-good SATA controller instead of the onboard bridge.