[charlie_ps2]

Your last two suggestions win my support.

I backed MGS2 up from original onto Princo. It booted on the v5 fairly normally - it takes a long time though both original and backup.

On the Jap 15000, it booted very slowly with the disk in the top right staying on a long time. On the other 15000, I got FMV skip. So I cleaned the lens and it worked better.

So you're into the issues elaborated in my post "Understanding DVD/DVD-R Issues".