Slightly more than a year later and now the disc drive has stopped working completely, refusing to open no matter what, not even the eject method with a pin in the eject hole. I decided to take the risk and pry the thing open, and inside the disc drive, I noticed there's a crack on the plastic piece which slides left and right, lifting the disc spindle into place to spin the disc. However, I'm not sure if this is actually the cause of the problem, as the disc tray will close fine if I turn on the system with it already open. There also appears to be some damage on the bottom of the tray, and so I don't think it's bumping the plastic slider into place. This then causes things to become misaligned and it can't open again.
Unfortunately, replacing a disc drive isn't so easy since they each have a special key which matches the system it's from, so to replace a drive the circuit board from the old drive needs to be installed into the new drive, which requires a bit of soldering.
But I'm not sure I need that anyway, since the laser and the spindle and such still work fine. Is it possible to just get a disc tray on its own? Or would I still need to buy an entire drive and rip out the disc tray from it? Can the gears be replaced? The slider piece I talked about looks like it could just pop out if I'm careful, but I'm not sure if the other gears can come off (though they may not need to as they don't appear to be damaged, but I can't know for sure with the rest of the assembly not working).
I s'pose it's a long shot, but does anyone here know anything about this?