Come on...I've loaded a drive with a disk that had a nice chip in it. It vibrated the whole table

The drive was perfectly fine afterwards.
One of my friends told me he microwaved a CD, then stuck it in the drive... *BOOM* The disk blew up, but the drive still worked, somehow, after they got the junk out...
It's not like the lens ever touches the disk, so I doubt you could do much to actually damage this part of the drive...