Hi Jeff,
I am by no means a computer techie guy, but did have the exact same thing happen to my Dell laptop about 2 years ago. I all of a sudden couldn't get the optical drive to work right, and what's more, I then couldn't get the the tray to open.
Since the laptop was still under warranty, I called Dell support, where a guy took remote control of my computer, tried a few things, and then, as I understood it, removed and replaced the driver software?. I hadn't a clue what he was doing back then, and I am still woefully lacking in my computer'ease 2 years later. But without doing a hardware swap, he did cure the malfunctioning DVD issue and tray lock. Again, I'm not exactly sure, but I think it was some software/driver app for my optical drive that had become corrupt, that he removed and re-installed to the latest version.
Sorry, not much help. But maybe this info (with it's complete lack of details), can somehow help.
BTW that lockup happened only after I started putting mini dvd discs from a new camera, in the DVD drive. Don't know if that contributed to the drive's crash. The support Tech guy did kind of indicated that those mini disc could indeed have caused optical drive to go out of wack.
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