It's a DVD drive, not a ROM drive.
But anyway, if he has System Menu 4.2 or below, you can use bannerbomb to install HBC, but if he wants to run retail games, this won't help at all. If he has 4.3, bannerbomb won't work at all. It is probably best to send it to Nintendo presuming he has never installed homebrew on it before and they should replace it free if it's still in warranty or relatively cheaply otherwise. If he wants HBC, he can install it afterwards (they'll probably update it to 4.3 so he'll need to use a game exploit, but I'm not sure about this. Just a theory of what most companies do when repairing devices).