Possible to disable optical drive?

My 1st generation MBP is a bit worn, as evidenced by the nice arc the bottom half now makes if you look at it straight on from the front. As a result of this, it seems that the CD drive cannot eject anymore (I've taken it to the Apple store, had outside techs look at it, tried home remedies; nobody can get the current disc out).
Annoyingly, the disc that's in there still loads in iTunes, is on the desktop, etc. and I'd kind of like to just get rid of it since I've already gotten what I need from it and for any further use away from this computer I'll just have to replace it anyway. Unfortunately it seems that you can't just unmount the drive in OS X, though. Is there a way, or better yet, is there a way to just kill the drive altogether?
Thanks in advance!

Did you try ejecting with the computer held upside down, or alternatively with the slot pointing down? I've seen this work with other slot drives (though I've never had to try it with an MBP). A light tap on the BTM sometimes works wonders, too, while held in such a fashion.
You can "unmount" the disc itself using Disk Utility even if you can't eject it, though. One strategy might be to have Disk Utility launch at startup, and then dismount the disc (choose the "Audio CD" to unmount in the DU sidebar, rather than the drive itself).
You can achieve the same result using command line instructions through the console, etc, but simply using DU is probably as easy as anything else. It should stay "unmounted" until your next restart.
Cheers
Rod

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