Repartitioning factory laptop questions

So I got a laptop for school and it was preloaded with tons of useless shit so I go reformat.
Apparently you're not supposed to delete their factory partitions (which were FAT32) but since I had done this countless times before  I figured that it would not be of concern.
So I get out my Windows XP Oro disk repartition it gets 99% through apparently disk is scratched I  click quit/exit setup (f3) then it rolls back everything. I go try to redo it again after cleaning the surface but it doesn't even recognize that there is a cd in there despite the BIOS showing that a cd-rom drive was connected. So I figure the drive might be finnicky about the media so I try their "recovery" disk and then another windows version that I have used to boot up with on other pcs and it just sort of skips going to a cd. It will flicker the drive for a short period of time but show no indication that it is bootable. So my conclusion is that repartitioning somehow fucked up the system which seems highly unlikely or the optical drive died. I called up ASUS(the manufacteur since newegg doesn't offer help/tradebacks on "notebooks") and said the optical drive died, what are your thoughts /comp/?

tl;dr

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I purchased ASUS Laptop preloaded with WinXP Home + bunch of other preloaded crap The HDD was partitioned into two 40gb portions with a FAT32 filesystem.
   
    So I decided to repartition the drive to a single NTFS 80gb and  install WinXP Pro. The installer stalls at 99% saying it failed to copy various important system files so I quit the setup, clean the disc, and put it in to try again. It doesn't recognize that there is a bootable disc and shows me the standard windows is fucked "NTLDR not found ctrl+alt+del."

    I assume that the flimsy drive cannot properly read the disc it was burned onto so I put in their factory backup cd which also fails to be recognized. The BIOS settings were set for the CD/DVD to boot first followed by HDD. At one point I disabled the HDD to test if the CD/DVD would even boot into a setup and it did not boot. The BIOS also acknowledged that the CD/DVD was connected.

    Right after the initial WinXP Pro installation failure I had to use the emergency eject to get the WinxXP disc back. So my questions are could the reparition of the drive caused any physical irreplaceable damage or has the optical drive failed?

    I have already called them and told them the optical drive failed and I'm sending it. I just wanted a second opinion on what you thought was the problem.

>>3 ...could the reparition of the drive caused any physical irreplaceable damage...?

No. Repartitioning a fixed disk cannot cause irrepairable damage to a "read only" CD-ROM or even a "write-once" recordable CD-R disc.  OEM manufacturers, however, frown upon any installation that ISN'T their included restore/recovery CD and will do things to make installing another OS difficult if not impossible.  Things including, but not limited to, "chipping" mobo/HDD pairs so they only function together; "keying" HDD boot sectors so they only boot with the included OS; "locking" HDDs via hardware with password.

>>4

Is there any software way to get rid of this "keying" hdd boot sectors or "locking" HDD?

Also, some manufacturers use hidden partitions for (parts of) BIOS, utilities etc. I've personally only seen Compaq do this, but I seriously doubt they've copyrighted the idea or anything.

It's an old idea, yes. Now we've got cheaper flash, we're not supposed to need that ...stuff anymore, but some companies can be surprisingly ...conservative in their choice of methods. (>cough< >cough< RIAA >cough<)

>>6

How would one go about finding out if this laptop/manufacteur does these sort of practices?

Usually a partitioning tool should be enough. ("usually" and "should" cos there's a reason I avoid DOS's FDISK.)

Try a Linux install cd or something, most should have an FDISK option (way better than the Dos's crappy version).

...that is, if the player can be booted from... If that's still a problem, see if you can boot from floppy. At least older OSes (pre 2k or something) should have this possibility.

>>3
Once you get a new disk drive, get a Knoppix CD, boot to it, and nuke and repartition the hard drive with qtparted.

>>5
Repartitioning will create new partitons with new boot sectors, so the old partitions' boot sectors are moot. For the MBR, creating a new partition table will overwrite it.