Disk drive crashed while installing Leopard

Hopefully someone can help me with my problem. I put in the disk to install leopard on my macbook. went through everything and it went ok until the actual installation. about half way through it, i could hear my disk drive start making funny noises like it was trying to read the cd but kept stopping, this went on for about a couple hours while the progress bar froze and the spinning wheel sat there. Finally I had no other choice but to manually turn off the macbook. after a couple restarts the OS ran and I was able to make my way through the set up and use the macbook, but now it takes at least 3 or 4 minutes to boot and I cannot use my disk drive, if I put a disk in it tries to read it a couple time and spits it out. any disk, i tried blank cd's, dvd's, dvd's with pictures, music cd, and the Leopard disc again.

So my questions are: 1. Could it be that the disc drive went out during installation, or did the installation not complete and that is causing problems with the disc drive.

and 2. if the disc drive gave out, is that a difficult fix. I have the service plan, but I dont know if that even possible to fix on a macbook.

Thank you, I appreciate any help I can get right now.

It sounds like your optical drive may be defective. That would also cause the long delay in boot up as the system is trying to read and validate. If you have applecare, just take it on in or make an appointment to have it replaced.

Regards.