Our Wii Family Edition (RVL-101 USA) has stopped reading the game disks we put in. All other functions work well. Following some manuals I found online, I opened and cleaned up the internals (down to the laser lens), but it did not help. A few replacement drives are available for purchase online, but it seems like there are multiple variants of the part (and title usually say D2A D2B D2C etc., which I understand is the code of the decoder chip).
One page lists many of the known drive and controller board versions. The most similar is the very last one, on the right side (which they name as D3-2/D3S/D4). The PCB is same shape, but our console has just the two larger chips instead of all three:
Of all the replacement drives I could find, the best match (visually) are similar to the one in the page I linked to above.
Can anyone identify this board revision?
Are the various DVD replacement drives that are in the market compatible?
Note: If you think there is a better forum for this question, please let me know.
Best Answer
After trying my luck in soft-modding the unit, attempt ended up unsuccessful due to the incompatibility of PC DVD drives with the Wii game DVDs. [used this site as a guide]
So I ended up purchasing a replacement DVD unit. It was not identical to my original one, but the board was of the same form-factor. The units are claimed by the seller to be cross-compatible.
After installing the replacement, my Wii now works as before, reading the various discs I tried throwing in.
For reference, here's the iFixit tutorial used to take the console apart for replacement.