I looked online for a replacement part, and I found one cached ad in google that was $9.99, and of course it was expired. The others I found were at least $75-99 plus shipping for the part. I also found used eMacs that were starting at $149 after shipping, so what 's the point?
I noticed that if I took a long IDE cable from a pc, one with only a single connection on both sides (80 wire, 40 pin) I could hook up an external cd and dvd unit. The power board for the DVD had burnt capacitors it was useless, unless I replaced those capacitors, which may have only been part of the problem. I decided to use an external USB enclosure to power the 4 pin molex connection of the cd and or dvd drive, and it worked perfectly. Sometimes using two power supplies can cause electric looping and make computers act very strangely. In this case, it did not.
So, you can get an external usb drive, or you can hack your eMac and use some old USB enclosure parts to do the job. The longer IDE cable was for testing if I wanted to leave the old drive in place. Usually even hacking, you would just replace the old drive with the new, and maybe lead the usb power 4pin molex connector inside the eMac maybe by cutting a small wedge out of the base with a dremel and metal cutting wheel.
Then again you could just buy a friggin' PC for $200 and be done with it. But that's no fun, is it?