Switching Xbox 360 Dvd Drives?

My friends DVD drive for his Xbox 360 broke and it is unfixable. I was wondering, since I fix Xbox's I have a lot of drives. He has a Lite-on drive and I have a Hitachi. If I were to extract the key and put it in the Hitachi, then could i put it in his xbox?

Suggestion:

I'm pretty sure you could, I'd just make sure they're both from the same generation of console. i.e Jasper, Xenon, Zephyr etc