Disc Drive will not Eject nor Read Discs

I didn't get an answer when I posted this in Laptops so, seeing as how it's relevant, I'll post it here in Disk Drives.

My laptop is a Dell Latitude D610 (http://www.whitegadget.com/attachments/dell/464d1194512669-dell-latitude-d610-dell-latitude-d610-laptop.jpg) running Windows XP SP3.

A couple months ago, I was fooling around with my laptop and did something incredibly stupid that I regret entirely: I removed my disc drive from my laptop while it was on. This caused my laptop to freeze, so I turned it off, and re-inserted it. However, now it cannot open by pressing the eject button or by ejecting it from My Computer. I can, however, open it by turning off my laptop, pushing a un-bent paper clip into the little manual eject eye, and pulling the actual disc reading part out (sorry, don't know what that's exactly called). This hasn't really affected me much as I don't use discs much. However, today I've had my laptop for little over a year and I wanted to reinstall Windows XP. I've tried manually opening the disc drive as mentioned and placing the disc in, but my laptop does not seem to notice that there is a disc in the drive (though it does recognize the drive itself). I can not hear the disc spinning as I would normally expect, either. I wanted to know what exactly was wrong with my disc drive and if it could be easily fixed, as I am low on money at the moment and can't afford a new one.

Thanks in advance.