Not reading discs right away

Many of you know the horrors that fall on the older generations of the ps3 20/40/60gs, mostly it is an issue with the blue ray drive where discs cannot be read.
Signs of this are as follows the game cd icon doesn't appear in the game list when one is inserted, or if a disc is in the tray the spinning icon in the top right corner continues to "scan" for the disc. These are signs of either a bad drive and needs to be replaced or the disc drive tray is misaligned, but fear not sometimes the smallest fix does the job.
I have the original 60g ps3 about half a year after my warrenty expired my blue ray drive decided to not read any form of disc be it dvd/cd/bd so i called sony they sent the coffin and i sent it back and when it arrived they had replaced the tray and parts of the drive to function again, so far so good discs reading again yay...not for long.
About a month later it happened again i was angered thinking that i just paid 180 to fix it i didnt want to spend that money again so i found a solution that seemed to work and hasn't had any problems as of yet..(knock on wood) but this being about 1 yr later im happy. Basically i figured it could be a bad sector of my hdd that is preventing my drive from reading anything so i reformatted my system and then voila! reads discs again so instead of calling sony right away try and reformat the system to its factory settings may be a pain for some and ok for others that have a large enough usb stick or drive to back up to but it saves you the cash in the end hope this helped anyone with this problem