Thanks for the blessing, Patrick. The CD-ROM drive could have a few things wrong. According to a source close to Harvey Norman, the bearings may go on old or inexpensive CD-ROM drives, causing vibration. It's possible your CDs are scratched or dirty and require multiple retries to read the data successfully. This can result in noisy head movements. It's also possible the reading head is dirty and causes all CD-ROMs to be difficult to read. To clean the head you can buy a variety of kits. Some contain a CD that cleans the head with a brush as it spins, which is recommended in dusty situations.
I like your second question very much. Data doesn't weigh anything. A bit of information on a hard disk is recorded by the alignment of a region of the magnetic coating on the surface of the disk. Whether it's pointed one way or another, a one or a zero, it weighs the same. On a CD-ROM disc it's recorded as a pit in the surface.
As far as the physics of the universe is concerned, no information -- pure random noise -- is the same as the complete works of Shakespeare, Bach, Freud and Feynman, plus all the early Roadrunner cartoons in full colour. It's only information because we interpret it as information. There is an argument that there's some detectable intrinsic order in real information, so we have dedicated alien spotters monitoring the skies for meaningful communication from space. This information, if such it be, is in the form of electromagnetic radiation, of almost negligible weight (someone once suggested that to get the exact mass you divide the energy by the square of the speed of light).
The information in your head is different, because it's stored in a different medium. If it turns out to be a chemical storage mechanism -- and there are more of the storage chemicals if you store more information -- then, in that form, the data does in a sense weigh something. Seeing as it's the data in your head that interprets the data on the hard disk, the data gains weight as you read it from the disk into your brain. Have you noticed that the more time you spend sitting at the computer, the more you weigh? There's a reason for that. Maybe you should be grateful you're having trouble getting data off your CD-ROMs.
- Neale Morison