Digging that hole deeper and deeper Now can't boot from CDROM

OK.....I seem to have made quite the mess of things.  I started having performance problems on a 3 yr old Dell Inspiron 530.

I decided I was going to do a fresh install and wipe out the old hard drive.

Well when I started wiping out the drive for some reason the BIOS started switching new drive letters to every device.  So what I thought was an old C drive was actually a removable USB drive...ended up wiping that out and installing windows on it.  Fortunately I had just backed up that backup drive.

Well then I reinstalled finally on a blank HD.  Well it was assigned the drive letter J.  I didn't like that at all.  Of course windows wont let you reassign a system drive so I decided to reinstall again but first I had some drive reassigning to do.

So I reassigned drive letters on all my drives...including my CDROM drives to different letters that reflected what they were originally and left the C drive available for the hard drive.

Thats when the problem I currently have hit me.  Now I cant boot and reinstall windows with my CDs because I get an I/O error on the CD drive.  There is a message that confirms the system sees the CD drive but for some reason it won't read it.  Next I did a step that I hope hasn't sent me over the edge into never never land.

I went into the bios and reset it to defaults hoping it would fix the problem.  Well it didn't.

Have i messed up to many things at once now?

The key issue is to get my CDROM to work so I can reinstall on my hard drive.

Any ideas?

Thanks