Ive been fighting this all day and I don't know what to do anymores.

I have a laptop, Sony Vaio mode PCG-GR370. It froze today. Thats not particularly uncommon for it, but today it wouldnt turn back on. When I rebooted it got stuck in an infinite reboot loop where it would load up until the Windows logo popped up, and then crash and reboot itself.

I figured I corrupted windows, so I grabbed the system restore disks that came with the laptop. I put the CD in the drive, it did its thing, asked me for disk 2, put it in, did its thing, repeat for disk three. At the end of disk 3 it asked me to put disk one back in. I did so, and it couldn't read it. I swore under my breath (ok, really loudly) and did a hard reboot. It then rebooted into windows XP and everything appeared fine. Then it asked me to put in the Applications Restore CD (to get all the default programs back installed) and I put it in -- and it couldn't read it.

So it seems that the cd drive stopped being able to read ANY disks mid-install. But its pretty clear to me that the drive is OK -- beyond the fact that it was just fucking working prior... The lights on it are blinky, when you put a CD in the drive it TRIES to autorun (spools up, the mouse changes to the CD icon) but fails. Windows correctly identified the type of drive as a Matshita ujda710 in the Device Manager, and the CDRom drive shows up in my computer as drive F just like it should.

But it can't read any CDs, and hence I can't really install anything. I'd like to just reformat it, but with the laptop you do that by putting a CDrom in and reformatting from there.

I don't know what to do. Help?