Wii Replacement Drive.

Mein Problem

at some point my Wii stopped reading discs. this was a bit annoying but i wasn't playing it much anyway.

but then i wanted to. thought it was something a disc cleaner might fix. nope. then was thinking i'd need to wait for a Wii U or buy a new Wii and go through the hassle of making Nintendo transfer crap from old Wii to new Wii. expensive. and not really worth it.

i use iFixIt alllll the time when breaking down various Macs at work... and vaguely recalled seeing something about Wiis at one point. checked... yup! there was a guide for drive replacement on a Wii.

at first i'll admit i looked around for non-iFixIt replacement drives first but couldn't find any that *also* did GameCube discs or that would be a known-good item. as in... i trust iFixIt massively more than i trust random eBay-seller-128658. mainly due to previous experiences with iFixIt in the past.

Meine Reparatur

i looked at the guide. looked like a simple one (to me). definitely easier than a MacBook LCD panel replacement or motherboard swap or even anything related to a previous generation Mac Mini.

went easy. only weird thing needed was a tri-wing and i had one of those already.

the drive *looked* a bit different than the one i popped out... but i had an original Wii... and changes are expected.

worked perfect on powering up again and i am able to play disc games once again. $80 and a half-hour of time was definitely better than any other options.

Mein Rat

to me this was a pretty simple swap. just pay attention and follow the guides instructions and you should be fine. for people not doing such a thing ever before make sure you pull the cables off the drive as instructed. as far as lifting tabs and pulling things out.

i used a small glasses flathead to remove the various sticker coverings / rubber feets. worked good. and all of them went back on just fine.