Exactly what TTMan said, take a paperclip and insert it into the tiny hole in your cd-rom to open it. It sounds like your HD may be getting ready to crash. What I would do would be to boot from a windows xp cd. Once you get to the blue windows xp screen asking to hit enter to continue or r to repair, hit R. Once it loads the command prompt run a chkdsk /f/r to check the disk for errors and try to recover from it. This will at the very least band-aid the problem until you can get another HD. That my hope it helps.