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/?

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.