Micron Transport XPE Laptop Help

I got a cheap laptop off of ebay and it worked fine when i got it but now i have a major bootup problem. Actually this may come as two problems. It all started with my cendyne cd burner i used it to burn a data disc with nothing but text files on it.
As soon as thats done i pop it into my laptop. The laptop freezes and shuts itself down. I couldnt turn it back on for a day. Now when i try to turn it on it cant read the hard drive. I ran a custom boot disk which said there was a partition of 680K on there and it was full. Now the laptop is 2.16 GB and has Windows 2000 professional on it. It had all the updates and everything. The laptop ran fine. Speaking of here are the specs.
This is a old laptop and i need something for office work so no snide remarks on the specs
98 MB RAM
166 MHZ Intel MMX
16MB VIDEO CARD with Svideo out
16 Bit sound card
IR ports front and back
Two pcmia slots
4X CD Reader
Floppy
No hard Drive caddy
Phoenix Bios 4.072 or something close to that
Micron Transtport XPE
Audio in, out, microphone
Joystick port which im lost on it looks like a triangle and has 16 pin holes on
Serial, Parrallel
and the rest of the usual ports.
Now i cant boot this thing up it gets to the boot screen where it lists its features. Then it freezes. I go in through the bios and it says it has a 2GB hard drive present. Now i gave this to my friend and he unscrewed it and found two of the pins to be bent we fixed that. And then tried to install dos it worked temporarily then the hard drive just wiped itself out. If anyone can help that would be great ive tried everything i can think of. It will only read windows 2000 and it wont read that disk. Or should i just get a whole new Hard drive. One more thing the oddest thing theres a button with a cup of coffe etched into above the floppy drive um any idea what that could be, thanks alot.

 

I forgot to mention that any cd i burn through my cendyne it automatically crashes the system no matter what system it is on. I burn a cd the system crashes so it isnt just my laptop. And i can only use nero.