Chosen Solution
My grandsons console was run over (true) opened everything up and only damage is the ribbon at front of console (easy repair)a very distorted case and smashed optical drive. Console boots up fine and responds as expected, because the case is so distorted I can’t install a replacement optical drive, my question is can an external blu ray drive be used or a generic drive placed in the case if the damaged metal was removed and the case modified to suit.
The main problem you are going to run into with anything like this that you try is that the blu ray drive that came in the unit from the factory is married to the motherboard. There is a PCB that is inside the blu ray drive that must stay with the motherboard. This means that you can replace the optical drive with an identical one but you must also switch the PCB on the new drive with the one that is matched to the motherboard. Unfortunately there is no way to replace the blu ray drive with anything other than the exact type that came with the Xbox One. I hope this helps.
Resoldered the cables reassembled perfect drive wont turn on? I bought a reman drive and followed the ifixit guide and another youtuber for the soldering.
interesting info so if the xbox drive is married to the motherboard and there is an electronic fault with the drive like mine there is no point in swapping the board over to a new drive they dont state this on amazon does this mean all of those drives on amazon are useless and wont work i was thinking of external usb player but it looks like they have taken care of that idea and that wont work either i am now thinking of putting a bluray player in my computer to copy the game files to a flash drive i bet i cant lastly where and how would you get a married to the motherboard replacement bluray player ALF CRUNCHBUCKET
your only option would be to get microsoft to replace the drive for you , they would then re marry the drive to your console
