Ok, Ive got a laptop here that wont detect anything in the cd rom drive.
I need to install XP on there.  Any suggestions?

No floppy drive in there either.

tried removing the CD Drive and putting it back in again?

Three options I can think of:

A) Get a working CD-ROM drive
B) Take HDD out of laptop, put into a desktop, copy Windows installation files onto it. Run install files from hard drive
C) Use RIS

big hammer?

Checked if the system can boot from a USB device? If so copy the disk contents onto that, there are pages that tell you how to boot from one.

As a laptop HD wont fit the connectors in a normal PC put it into a dedicated USB2 enclosure and copy the files over.