The Apple eMac is one of the "New World" Macs that were released following the success of the iMac. This particular machine was a 700MHz, Revision 1 eMac. It had the higher spec DVD/CDR drive fitted, which should have been capable of reading DVDs and burning CDs.
My friend's eMac had a defective DVD/CDR drive. The only option was to remove and replace it, but first we had to get the eMac open and dig down to the drive.
We obtained a replacement drive from somewhere; I think it was from FreeCycle. We actually fitted a plain DVD drive, because that's what we had.
Photos of the disassembly are in this Flickr set.
Reassembly is the reverse of disassembly.