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/?

>>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.