LaCie and Internal Drives Fail with iTunes 7.7

Question

Ok here's the situation:
Problem #1 -- All of my burn drives have committed massive, bloody, catastrophic suicide. My internal "died" literally days after the warranty expired (I did not get AppleCare). It's still there and it recognizes when I put CDs and DVDs into it; I can hear it spin at start up and it spins when something is in there. It simply won't PLAY or BURN anything, I don't know why. I get all sorts of interesting "fail" messages, including the laser can't be calibrated and the device was removed. Usually it initalizes and then seconds later says burn completed, ejecting the disc which hasn't been written. Apple offered to fix it by installing a new one for $500+; I declined and instead purchased a LaCie external drive...
Problem #2 -- which used to work just fine. It was a little tempermental but with minor tweaking I was able to burn in iTunes, Roxio Toast (which now has decided to start crashing every time I do a drag-and-drop), Finder, etc. Now the LaCie doesn't want to work either. Sometimes the drive will mount, sometimes it won't. Even when it does mount, it isn't working properly. Sometimes I'll get the same device removed message as I do with the internal, other times it just squeaks at me. No, nothing has been dropped, banged, drowned, etc. I've run EVERYTHING on both drives -- Disk Utility, permissions corrections (even though there were no problems with any iTunes files), turning off CD text, dealing with the weird language bug in the International System Preferences, Burn Patch, setting burn speed to 4x instead of best possible, battery out for 15 minutes and restart, compressed air, etc... nada. Which leads to...
Problem #3 -- the next problem. If I can't burn CDs, I won't die. It's an annoying, inconvenient and expensive problem, but I'll survive. I can just use my old iPod... oh, right, that just died, too. Unfortunately, along with the lovely MacBook and LaCie, I've also purchased iLife '08, Mac OS X 10.5.1, and a 200 GB Time Capsule. Of course, all of these require a functioning CD drive to install, and without one I have a lot of useless and rather expensive crap. On to...
Problem #4 -- the final issue. I have 2 512 MB memory cards in the laptop. According to my System Profiler, I have 1.69 GB left on my hard drive and the computer keeps yelling at me that I don't have enough space left on my start up. I know this. I also know that I want to keep my files, which is why I bought the Time Capsule in the first place. I haven't done ANY backups and really need it in place, both so I can free up space on the hard drive and also so I don't lose everything with the inevitable epic fail. Again, I can't install the Time Capsule without a working CD drive, so this brings us full circle to problem #1.
Any help or suggestions would be GREATLY appreciated.
Specs:
MacBook
OS X 10.4.11
LaCie d2 DL DVD+-RW with LightScribe
Matshita CD-RW CW-8221
iTunes 7.7.1 (11)
<Edited by Moderator>

Answer 1

95% of this is really primarily a hardware issue, possibly an OS issue, and 5% an iTunes issue. I would suggest posting this on a MacBook hardware forum where you'll get specific assistance for MacBooks.
I have 1.69 GB
On the external drive issue (I assume this is really a DVD drive though you keep on saying "CD") it could be a chicken and the egg question. A lot of the problems could be due to the crowded drive. I keep at least 18GB free on my computer all the time for OSX wiggle room.
Perhaps your next line of investigation should be to purchase a drive for backup purposes, and a separate drive for archiving files.