My disc drive takes in discs, almost reads them, then spits them out

This post really contains two questions. The second question depends on whether I can get the first one answered.

My disc drive is playing up recently, and I'm not sure why. I'm on a Mid-2011 21.5" iMac and my disc drive accepts the disc, jutters like it normally does like it's reading it and then pushes it back out. I'm trying to reinstall the Apple Application software package because I recently did a clean install of OS X Mountain Lion. It rejects the disc rather quickly, but when I put a CD in, it stays for a while longer before doing the same thing.

I rebooted and tried again and the same thing happened.

So I rebooted into Windows 8 and it did the same with the Apple disc, but read the CD, opened it in Itunes but wouldn't play it.

I wanna get the data off but when I put the disc into a Windows device it doesn't seem to recognise it at all. (but the album works fine)

If it's a hardware issue and obvious, I'll probably take it to the Apple store, I think I have 3 years warranty.

Failing that...

Does anyone know how I can get iPhoto on my computer (which came with it in 2011) without having to pay to download it on the Apple store?

Thank you! 🙂