Sorry Eddie, forgot to mention that my MR1601HD hangs and crashes occasionally too. Sometimes it chucks a spaz if I've put something into it that it can't read (like one of those .avi files I mentioned in my previous post). At other times, it does it's lolly if I try to eject a disc while it's still doing the initialize read. Mine got going again after turning off the power and starting it up again. Sometimes I had to press a few buttons on the remote and it eventually got going again. If this doesn't work for you (sounds like it won't from what you've already written) then the laser might not be able to find the 'directory' block on the disk any more. Kinda like a HD not being able to find the boot sector on a HD disk. Hmm.. food for thought - being a hard-drive unit, I wonder if the internal HD has carked it? I know my unit makes that 'darnnnt darrrnt' HD boot-up sound similar to a PC booting up when I fire the unit up - before it does anything else. Maybe this thing has to read something off the internal HD before it can start? Or perhaps the laser unit is gone. My fav old el-cheapo DVD player just up and died one day the same way. Good as gold for about a year, then one day I turned it on and it would recognise anything I tried to play. It was out of warranty, and only cost 90 bucks, so I did a little 'surgery' on it (removed the outer casing), and I could see the laser trying to read the disc from inside to out several times before the unit finally put up the 'no disc' error message. I'm guessing here it couldn't find the 'boot sector' on the DVD - the directory part where it finds the info that tells it what kind if disk it's playing. Not much help to you, I know, but a few things to perhaps ponder about...
Quokka, November 2007