I just got an old xbox from my friend and the disc drive doesn't work. Is there anything I can do with it without replacing the disc drive? And where would I even find a replacement? (I have tried looking, but my Googling skills must suck since it only ever shows me 360 ones)
Not easily. Anything legit of interest on Xbox requires discs. If modded it'd be possible to network transfer games to the hard drive, and use media files for movies or music. But I've never seen a compatibility list to say which games have issues when not run from a disc.
Depending on the model you could TSOP flash it. Which it's been a long time since I've done it, but I think it still requires a disc to exploit the system, or maybe you can hotswap the HDD with PC. I think that's what I did on the last one to install the files and bypass the needing of a disc. Once modded though, your best bet is to change the Hard drive out, obtaining games on the other hand might be a challenge, I'm sure someone has an archive of them some where though.
I believe the xbox drive was tied to the console like the 360, however as everybody went other modding ways it was easier to ignore and replacement/repair is tricky (most would instead head down the laser replacement path, give or take what I mention in a moment). I will say though that a lot of the time the drive was not dead but the little rubber band inside it getting messed up. If the drive does not open then it might well be this. Take it out and clean it and the thing it runs on, possibly replace it if you can find something suitable. Equally even if it does not eject normally then keep trying and it might eventually pop out. Stick a copy of splinter cell in there and do the softmod, after that ignore the DVD as it is of limited use. You can do a hotswap mod, and yeah if it is an older one you could TSOP mod it as well. The ones that did not involve opening it up though did involve having a game boot.
Actually yeah, I was misremembering that list of mistakes MS made in the xbox thing, or a similar discussion.
