The door on my eMachine CD drive is often difficult to open. Any ideas on how to fix it? If not, is it easy to replace the drive?
Most CD/DVD drives have a little emergency eject pin hole in front of the drive that will allow you to stick a paper clip to manually open the drive by pushing the clip inwards. It sounds like the CD drive might be near the end of it’s life cycle but optical drives are very inexpensive and you could find a decent CD/DVD burner for less than 60 bucks.
CD/DVD drives are fairly easy to replace just be sure that you’re not voiding any warranty by opening up the case and because you’re opening up the case you need to wear a anti-static wrist trap to protect frying any of the sensitive components in the computer or you could just touch a metal bolt some where on the computer to discharge and static buildup. It’s a good idea to shut down the computer when opening up the case.
There are two types of connections when it comes to CD/DVD drives on is “IDE” and the other is “Sata”
IDE’s look like a long flat ribbon cable and the Sata’s just looks like a plain cable. If your not sure you could just take the optical to the store and ask them for a drive with the same connection. Take pictures and notes to exactly where all the cables go and only remove what you need to remove to get the drive out.