Today I upgraded my Dell Latitude C840. I removed the older DVD/CD-RW drive and replaced it with a newer DVD burner. Here’s how it’s been done.
I had a Toshiba DVD Super Multi Drive (it reads CDs and DVDs, burns CDs and DVDs) laying around and I decided to install it into my old friend Dell Latitude C840. I wasn’t sure if the new drive would work but it did.

Before you do anything with your laptop do not forget to unplug the AC adapter and remove the battery.

Step 1.
Remove the RAM door witch is secured by one screw. Now loosen the screw marked with the orange circle and pull the DVD/CD-RW drive from the laptop.

Step 2.
You’ll have to transfer the mounting bracket from the old drive to the new one. Simply remove two screws on both sides of the bracket and transfer it to the new drive.

Step 3.
Install the new DVD burner into the laptop, secure it with the screw and install the RAM door back in place. I wasn’t able to transfer the face plate and because of that you can see that the new drive doesn’t belong to this laptop but it works.

Witch Toshiba drive did I use? I used a drive with this part number V000061750 and it worked like a charm. It was detected my Latitude C840 right away and I didn’t have to configure anything.

After some research, I found that this drive V000061750 came from a Toshiba Satellite A105 laptop. There is a whole bunch of other DVD drives listed for this model.
Here are part numbers:
CD-RW/DVD-ROMs: V000061010, V000061020, V000061030, V000070330
DVD Super Multi Drives (Double layer DVD burners): V000061040, V000061050, V000061060, V000061070, V000061080, V000061090, V000061750, V000062240, V000062600.

All these drives are interchangeable, so they all should work fine with a Dell Latitude C840 laptop.

You can find original CD/DVD drive for a Dell Latitude C840 laptop here.