Mac mini, bootcamp, and no superdrive

My mac mini, (late 2006 1.6 ghz intel core duo, 1gb ram Model: MA206LL/A ) doesnt have a working disk drive, i recently bought it off craigslist to play around with bootcamp, everything seems to work fine except the disk drive, which is extremely frustrating, because I can't really seem to understand whats going on. (when it tells me to insert the disk, it just spits it out after I insert it) I don't know a whole lot about macs, but could somebody explain why my mac mini seems to be able to read/write CD-R but just spits out any DVD-R (also tried with a dvd movie to confirm it was DVD disks having the problem)? I was really looking forward to using bootcamp, but i guess I'm going to have to mess with the hardware a bit. I'm currently burning windows XP onto a CD-R to see if it will work, The snow leopard install disk worked just fine when i re-installed the OS (hoping this would solve the problem) Does anybody know if it'd be possible to use bootcamp with an external dvd drive? or should I look into replacing the superdrive? and, any idea on how much it might cost, (for the drive, and where I can buy the right one)?

update: tried 3 instillations of xp, 2 burned to CD-R, 1 burned to DVD-R
one burned by the mac mini on to cd-r, and the other two burned by my home PC (the cd&dvd). mac mini could not verify the burned ISO when burned,
when inserted, bootcamp could not find the install disk, and the CD-Rs were both recognized as blank media, and the xp burned to the DVD was ejected.

any advice on external dvd drives, or cost of replacement for a superdrive would be really appreciated right now...

TL;DR - if I want to use bootcamp, would an external dvd drive work to install windows FROM? or would I need to replace the internal drive?