Just a thought, but these may get some response.
Look online to see if there is a combination of buttons that can be pressed at start up. This will give you a hard reset of everything. Most pieces of kit have this... see Sky boxes/Android phones as examples. This will start the basic boot sequence and possibly some choices. Your computer friend should be able to see what to do, usually you can tell the machine to boot from the disk or perform a factory reset, it will also tell you if the RAM is toasted. I can't see why it would be though.
If you can get the drawer open, put in the disk, the machine may be looking for it to finish the routine. It may finish off and be OK.
Don't pay anything out, not worth it.