I was putting in my CD to play a game called Battlefield 1942 like I always did.
This time when the usual sound comes up to read a CD (it's pretty loud) it sounds the same but all of a sudden it sounds like it just dies, but you can still hear it.. So I keep trying to open and close the drive and it does the same thing for this CD or any other CD. I tried restarting a couple of times but still nothing. Then I tried putting the CD in again but this time NOTHING happens at all, no sound that the CD is being read, nothing.
I looked in "My Computer" and the D:/ drive icon was gone.. I tried restarting and the Dell screen comes up, usually whenever the computer starts up it makes a couple of sounds inside the computer itself. Now the Dell screen loads up but there was no sound and the screen just freezes. I have to press F12 and then choose "Normal startup" to start my computer up now..
So I tried reinstalling the driver for the disk drive but still, nothing.

I have a Dell Dimension 2400 on WinXP SP2. The driver for my CD drive is called "Maxtor 6Y080L0". In Device Manager I tried uninstalling this driver under "Disk Drives" and rebooting and it reinstalled but still didn't fix the problem. I wonder if I should try uninstalling "Primary IDE Channel" under "IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers" because I read up about some stuff on this. But I don't want to make this mess any worse..

When the first screen comes up to load up the computer, the Dell BIOS thingy, the bar loads up all the way but it just sits there, like I said I have to press F12 to start. Also it used to make a couple of beeps when starting up from the disk drive but now it doesn't, i'm not sure if the drive is dead and if I should replace it or anything, I can still open it and stuff, but when I put CD's in, it sounds like it is about to read it but it just doesn't.

I am out of ideas and don't know what to do, please help me.

Thankyou.