FFXI & PS2Follow

Hello again, seems I find myself in a bit of a more serious bind than simply looking for the best offline webcontent storage program.

I have probably the second/third generation of PS2... one of which IS included in the Sony lawsuit regaurding the infamous Disk Read Error. Originally this started 2-3 years ago by freezing on dvd-movie disks (or suddenly saying "cannot read disk")/skipping/etc. Within the last year it slowly showed signs of doing this to dvd-game disks (completely locked up FFX though the bgmusic still played) and now... "Cannot Read Disk" 100% of the time or "Insert Readable POL Disk" in case of trying to install ToAU. For awhile the ps1 & non-dvd disks would still play... but even they suffer this infamous error.
Heard a lot of players on FFXI are familiar with this error and have fixed it (temporarily) numerous times. Was wondering if anyone had a step by step guide they could share with me for self-fixing long enough to install the expansion... or if I should just buy a new/used PS2 or give in and send $45 for a two-week turnaround time to Sony themselves for repair?

Thanks for your help
~Ravenwind