Repair broken CD/DVD Ultrabay drive

[Steerpike]

My friend's R60 CD/DVD combo drive no longer works. Inserting a CD or DVD causes the head to 'seek' - you can hear the drive spin, and the head move, but it never 'finds' what it's looking for.

New Lenovo drives are in the $160-$200 range, and used ones seem hard to come by. It occurs to me that the inner workings of these drives are probably generic, and I could pick up some basic drive internals for not much money. The problem is, finding what to buy, since there are probably different types/sizes of OEM devices.

Specifically, the R60 takes the "Ultrabay Enhanced" sized drives, while my T60 takes the "Ultrabay Slim" sized drives. Are the actual inner drives differently sized, or are they all the same? To buy a replacement core drive, I obviously don't need to stick to the specific manufacturer (Hitachi, Panasonic, etc) but I would guess there are some criteria I have to match.

Finally, does anyone know of a good site to buy such OEM drives from?

Since my drive is non-functional, I'm happy to destroy it in terms of pulling it apart.

[Harryc]

What's the part number on the old drive? There's a few Ultrabay enhanced combo drives on EBay for much less than the price you've mentioned. Here's a new one, bid on it ... comes with a fancy Thinkpad pouch too, Yay -
Ulrtrabay Enhanced Combo Drive