Its all good but I did in fact get my Ps2 fixed twice before 06. Matter of fact it was around 02,03 because my son wasn't born yet.
Maybe you had a warranty? Because I posted the link, sony didn't pay for repairs til they lost in court and was FORCED to pay. 2005 is when that ruling went into affect. My PS2 died around the time you talking about and I didn't get my shyt fixed. The reason I'm certain about all this is because I was working at Funcoland when the PS2 and Xbox launched. PS2's was stacked to the ceiling in every Funcoland (we would communicate) And we would have reps from game companies visit to ask questions about sales. The sony rep told us Sony knew of the Disc Read Error issue and wasnt' going to do anything about it to his knowledge. What pissed me off was My PS2 out the box didn't work. It would only read the blue disc (CD's) but not DVD based games. I bought a PS2 and Tekken Tag. Brought it home, went straight to my neighbors house aka "The chill spot" and we was like 10 deep hyped as fukk like
I put the game in.. shyt wouldn't play. nikkaz started laughing their asses off
What was fukked up is the only reason I was able to get a replacement system? Because I worked there.
Otherwise, I would of had to send my system to sony and wait for another PS2 once they had more.
A PS2 at launch went for as high as 10,000 on ebay back then, so getting PS2's was no easy thing. Imagine being fukked like i was, then the store saying you can't get a refund, but you can wait til sony gets back to you.
Long story short, my manager gave me another system that was supposed to go to a customer
Sony, fast forward to 2015 still carries themselves the same way. So I ride for Xbox because of it.
I'm like an activist n shyt
My friends xbox one drive already messed up breh .
The funny thing about it he hadn't even been gaming in the last couple months.
Now all he can do is buy digital games .
Nobody is saying 100% of the millions of systems made will be full proof tho
And neither system even uses the disc drive for gaming. Its only used to install a physical game.. games don't run off the disc drive this gen on either system. So while its harder to mess up, I can't really say how to handle stuff because I haven't had the issue. I can help you tho. Peep below...
Simple answer. Make sure you remember this because it will save you time on everything moving forward.
Let me google that for you 
