Drvies not responding to programs completely

Hey, I'm running a Compaq Presario 6000 with XP. Been having trouble with my drives. My DVD drive and floppy drive don't seem to work at all and haven't for awhile. Haven't worried about it too much since info can be transferred with Flash Drvies and CD's now. Of course, now the CD-ROM drive and USB drives don't seem to respond completely.

And that's what the strange thing is. I put a CD-ROM game in my drive and it loaded up the start up screen which includes different options, like "Play", "Uninstall" "Quit" , etc..., so I hit play. Then, any noise the CD drive makes dies down and then I get a message saying "Please insert TP2001(that's the game) disk". Of course it's already in there. The drive seems to recognize it enough to show the start up menu, but not the actual game.

Then there's the USB. I have an iPod. It connects to the computer and iTunes using a USB cable. When plugged in, the iPod should charge and iTunes should automatically start. Well, it charges, but it won't interact with iTunes at all.

Really strange, or at least it is to me! On a sad side note I can't even open up the case on my computer! It's a side panel and it seems to want to slide towards the rear, but that hasn't been successful. I'm assuming I'll have to have access to the inside if my drives are going to work again!