So the thing needed dismantling, not least to completely remove the un-needed printer hanging off the top. One thing you can say about it is that it's very well built, proper folded sheet steel throughout, the only bodgy thing seemed to be the printer, which was seemingly just a third party inkjet attached to the top awkwardly.

I'm terrible at figuring out how things come apart. I must have twisted and turned it a hundred times in an effort to take the printer off of it. It turned out you remove it by undoing a latch at the rear of the unit, then sliding the printer backwards. Doing this helped reduce the weight, and sheer bulk, considerably.

Next was the main case, of which I couldn't quite figure out it's design. I undid all screws and still couldn't figure out how it came apart. That is until I lifted it a certain way and the back slid off a little!

It turns out the main case is split in twain, with the PC and specially positioned DVD drives occupying a metal cage at the rear, and the entire top/front robot arm / disk input/output spindles, which slides off by pulling it straight out from the front via runners.

Undoing the underside of the front assembly reveals a metal base plate with the driver board mounted, along with, of course, all the wires leading to motors and sensors, plus power and USB leading into the PC and PSU at the back.

At this stage I was happy to loosely cobble it all back together, plug in the obligatory keyboard, mouse and monitor, and fire it all up.

It lit up and the BIOS screen appeared.

The robot arm carried out an initial homing motion, and became 'stressed' as steppers do when they're energised.

Windows XP booted up.

I found the password in work records, removed it from the work domain and re-configured it for my network, and fully Windows Updated it (as far as it'll ever go!)

I then ran the included scribe software to test it out.

Lo and behold, as expected the gripper mechanism wouldn't keep hold of disks - it would just drop them after lifting them a few inches.

What's interesting is that it very consistently dropped the disks, there was no intermittency, which is what I thought would be the most likely thing to occur. Every single time, for about 20 iterations, it dropped the disk pretty much at the same height too.

In the next post I'll describe the CD gripper arm, the diagnostics I carried out, and fix-up.