Wii makes grinding noises, scratches discs

[Op Intensify]

Had an unpleasant surprise today after picking up Shikigami III for the Wii. The system was bought at the US launch, so it's pretty old, but my Gamecube has held up perfectly well for all these years.

It's grown steadily more noisy over the past couple years, but it never sounded like something was grinding every time it reads disc data. When I popped the disc out, it had these circular marks around the outer edge that wouldn't rub off. Playability was not affected but I have little doubt this will really damage the discs over time.

I have cleaned the drive twice with the official cleaning kit, when SSBB started taking too long to load. It's a big hard plastic disc with a cleaning pad on it that you slide into the drive and wiggle over the lens. I'm worried I was too vigorous with this back then and it screwed up the parts.

Anything I can do besides sending it in or getting a new one if I don't have much technical proficiency?

[EllertMichael]

mine started making clicking noises and stuttering. apparently it's a common problem.

you could replace the laser or try and fix your existing laser (you will probably run into the same problem again down the line) or do what I did and mod your wii to run games off an external HDD, therefore bypassing the disc drive for faster loading times and longer reliability.
...and keeping your games from being ruined!

[Op Intensify]

Is there any way I can back up purchased Virtual Console/Wiiware games to a HDD with softmodding?

[EllertMichael]

Is there any way I can back up purchased Virtual Console/Wiiware games to a HDD with softmodding?

Sort of. WiiWare/VC games are .wad files and those can be stored on the HDD but can't be played directly. use a homebrew application called "wad installer" in order to boot them from the system menu. from here you can delete/install them as you please so this helps with the Wii's pathetic internal memory problem

[Op Intensify]

Looking on that wiki, it seems there's a risk of bricking your Wii if you try to mess around with WAD files and one ends up corrupted.

So I assume the ones already on the system/SD card at least won't be affected by softmodding?

[ZellSF]

???

My Wii is very noisy too, maybe some screws ended up wrong when installing the WODE, which means I only really ever need my Wii's disc drive for Eternal Darkness. If I place it three rooms away I can barely hear it.

Looking on that wiki, it seems there's a risk of bricking your Wii if you try to mess around with WAD files and one ends up corrupted.

I think it's one of those 0.0001% "well don't say we didn't warn you" things.

[trap15]

WAD corruption is a lot more common than it sounds. Don't mess with them.

[blizzz]

Softmodding is safe as long as you don't install pirated Wads or random channels that are supposed to do cool stuff. Putting your own games from DVD to HDD and making nice channels for them is also safe. You can even make a full backup of your system storage and depending on your Wii you can install a different boot loader.

But, if you just want a working Wii to play your games you can simply send it to Nintendo and they'll repair / replace it for a few bucks and copy all games and safedata to the new console. Just note that they charge a lot more for consoles that were (soft)modded in the past.

[Ex-Cyber]

Just note that they charge a lot more for consoles that were (soft)modded in the past.

Was this ever actually confirmed to be Nintendo policy and not a one-off incident?

[Op Intensify]

Yeah, if you remove the softmodding and it has no hardware mods I'm not sure how they could detect it.

Shiki III seems to really give the drive a workout, since it reads new voice data from the disc every time someone speaks in the dialogue scenes. I wonder if things will improve if I turn them off. Shame on Aksys for not bringing over the 360 version! I also think that slot disc drives just shouldn't exist. They're too prone to hardware failure and disc damage. I think the only reason they make them is because they make hardware look cool. Everything should be a tray or a toploader spindle.