PlayStation®3 Technical Help

[bosher123]

OK firsts, I know there is a lot of questions already up about the ps3 freezing and I've read through a lot of them and did what they said.

Basically my PS3 first stopped reading disks, all of them, blue ray and dvd disks. This happened for no reason, I was in the middle of playing a game and it just stopped, it didn't freeze - just stopped loading. 

So I went ahead and replaced the laser/lens part and it started to read my disks again! But now it freezes after 1-2 hours of use, sometimes less. The strange thing is it only freezes when it is running games, if I play a downloaded game it is completely fine. 

When I say freeze I don't actually mean completely frozen. e.g. If im playing fifa and the game finishes it will just show up with the loading icon but not moving onto the next screen. THere is still stuff moving around like text and pictures. I don't know why? 

So next i though it might be an overheating problem...so then i took it apart and put some new thermal paste on it, aired it down with some compressed air and put it back together. Still freezes/stops loading! I don't know whats wrong with it...could it be a problem with the hard drive? or the blueray drive PCB? I've tried doing the safe mode options...just haven tried to use the PS3 on a completely formatted hard drive yet. 

By the way it is a CECHK03 i think...a phat 80gb model, so it is quite old. 

Any ideas on what the problem is? 

Cheers

[strangeplaice]

I think the problem is the one you came out with at the start. A problem solely affecting disk based games would indicate a BluRay drive fault. The fact it freezes after an hour or two says to me that the drive may be misaligned, or there may be damage between the drive and it's connector to the motherboard. Does it make any strange or loud noises when reading the game?

[bosher123]

it makes the same noises it used to when it was working e.g. the sound of the laser moving up and down detecting the disk. It almost seems as if it gets confused? When the game stops i can hear it repeatidly trying to read the disk. Surley if it was a misaligned driver then it wouldnt work at all? Rather than work for a bit then stop? Might it be an overheating problem?

[strangeplaice]

Overheating would probably cause the fans to kick up a lot. Tbh, the disk drive is really a bit beyond my knowledge level but there's 101 things that can go wrong with it without any visible or audible signs.

If you can get one cheap that's for the exact same model it may be worth simply replacing the drive itself.