Question on Stealed drives and Other concerns!! please help!

Ok, I understand that stealth drives are usually set up such that you can control openning/closing with hotkeys. But what if you need to reformat your computer and the software controlling the hotkeys for the stealth drives is lost, how do you open them then? Or a similiar situation, you want to do all the mods before installing any software for a new system, can you? or do you have to wait until after the system is set up to install the drives?

Most of you can probably tell i'm a newb, but i'm seriously impressed with all the creativity and work you each put into your sytems. I am going to do my first mod but am considering buying new parts ahead of time. Right now this is what I am working with, I understand it is outdated and wanted people to tell me what they would upgrade in order of importance for me to be prepared for games like HF 2 and the new Unreal Tournament. I plan on using the holiday to construct my mod and will post pics when i'm done.

AMD 1.4ghz
512MB DDR ram
Nvidia Geforce 2 Ti
80 MB seagate 7200 rpm
15" LCD (Samsung)
Pioneer Slot DVD drive
24x CDR
zip drive (thinking about getting rid of it)
3com lan card
sblaster live 128

Make a corner of the cover give a bit so you can push the button (Page 2)

alternatly, if you get really ambitious, you could solder a SPST momentary switch to a wire lead and then solder the ends of the wire lead to the two contact points for the current switch on the drive PCB and then run it out to wherever you like on your case. So to open the DVD drive you hit the small button on the empty bezel below the floppy (or something similar) but that's a little more work.