The laser is known to fail, to the point it’s somewhat common for these to be temperamental even with a known good drive. It tends to be more of an issue with the early Thompson drives, but the Samsung SDG-605 -006 is almost as bad. You’ll need to find a new DVD drive, or a compatible laser. In SOME cases, you can clean the lens, but this is questionable at times as the issue may come back, and it may be too far gone.
You want to avoid the Thompson drives (these are known to be junk). Try and avoid the SDG-605 -006 due to the CD-R issue; the -005 is okay. If you can find the Hitatchi drive, buy it if you can pay for it. These are relatively rare as they’re pretty much only used in the 1.6 console, but these are far better than the others. However, if you want to play legally owned backups the Samsung -005 tends to be the “go to” drive.
Since these do not care about the optical drive “matching” like the 360/One (even then, Live has not worked since 2010 which would be the only reason to care as not matching can result in a console ban which will never happen today), find a working Philips or Samsung drive that is tested, unless you’re getting it for practically nothing. They still have issues, but they aren’t as expen$ive and rare as the Hitatchi used in the 1.6 systems. Refer to this guide to change the drive.
I get it with these - I got 2 for $40 (1 was ready to use and the other has this issue, other than one having a prenatal controls with a PIN but seeing as this is the “master PIN” era anyone with Google can find NBD) and it took a while to find a reasonably priced laser since I have the Samsung drive in that one.
If that doesn’t work, it’s likely an ATA logic issue that’s isolated to the optical drive, but not the hard drive. Usually, ATA logic causes it to display a service error, but it can happen in odd ways. You normally get a service required error like this with a matching error code:
1 
1 
144 
