Mac laptops forum: My Macbook Pro is damaged after a drop. Can it be a DIY fix?

From the sound of it at a minimum you have a bad top case and ODD. The fact that a USB keyboard works is good, since it indicates there is likely no damage to the MLB. Since there's drop damage, if you took it to an Apple store they'd probably quote you something in the $500US range I'd expect. Probably wouldn't be much different from any other AASP.

Doing a top case replacement on the unibody models is a bit of a pain, but it can be done if you're very careful and deliberate about it. So presumably if someone is selling a mid-09 (there was no late 09 MBP, just mid-09 and then mid-2010, so if you bought it in late 09, it's a mid-09 model) top case on ebay you could try that.

If it were me, I probably wouldn't waste the money. If disconnecting the flex cable for the top case didn't also kill the power button I'd say just unhook it, use it with an external keyboard, but the ODD sounds like it is toast. If you're not going to replace it, then you can just disconnect it from the MLB and stop it from making noise. I wouldn't put anything in the drive that you care about, because there's no telling what would happen. And with drop damage, there's always a possibility that something is held together by sheer dumb luck, and if you go moving things around internally, it's going to break off. Maybe get the ODD replaced, but I'd just leave the rest alone or there's a decent chance things will just get worse.

Kind of long story short, drop damage is like liquid damage, in that it can be a funny thing. I've seen units with huge corrosion spots (10-25% of the total surface area) on the MLB that work fine, and others with just this tiny little bit of corrosion that kills the whole system. Drop damage is kind of the same thing. Sometimes absolutely nothing happens, a lot of times you suffer a lot of collateral damage, you're in kind of the rarest of the groups where very little happens beyond cosmetic damage.