T43 boots from optical, but XP won't recognize it.

[fenneltown]

As the title says, my CDWR, DVDROM will boot my T43 (2668) and work properly in other T43's. But my fresh XP SP3 won't see it. It did see it, until I impatiently pulled it after popping out the pully stick and not getting the "safe to remove" notification. Everything else in this XP install is good (no ?'s in hardware manager, everything else is great). Easy fixes??? Thanks.