Think I will just try a new drive, been looking for service manuals, and there are none for the 5033, so no idea where to test voltages, although hard drive is running fine.

This all sounds very similar to a problem I had with my Sony Vaio recently. Sometimes when I put a disc in the drive would keep spinning up and try to access it for so long until it finally gave up. I finally realised that every now and again the read head was parked right up to the extreme outside edge and having nothing to lose I gently oushed it back to the centre. Worked perfectly after that but then after a while it would happen again and once more the read head would be right out on the extreme edge. I was going to replace the drive (2 second job to take it out - just two screws and a shake) umntil I saw the price! If I need it I've got an external CD/DVD USB drive that works perfectly well.

Got the replacement cdrom today and its fitted in. XP can see it but bios cant so cant boot from it, not an entirely satisfactory outcome but it works.

Found a workaround for the non booting CD drive. A bootable floppy that has a driver to enable bootable PCMIA USB drives. I have made a bootable SP3 of Win XP on a USB drive and boy does it load the drivers quick from the USB on the laptop so I can now setup my new msata adapter and msata card.

Thats only if I cant restore the hard drive image to the msata card which I plan to do using a USB to IDE cable which arrived today, it works with an old 2.5 IDE hard drive so we will see.