Haha.... nice to meet a Hindi speaking friend around here :D
Age of the system/drive does not matter. What matters is its quality and how much writing it has done. A drive can last tens of years if is rarely used and just for reading 'Healthy, scratch-free' discs. But can expire within a few weeks if it has to do a lot of writing on DVDs. Even reading operation on too many dusty, old and scratched DVDs can dramatically reduce the life of the laser eye of an optical drive.
Cleaning the lense may help sometimes. It did for me once or twice. But handling the internal parts is not recommended unless you are familiar and comfortable with such things. Use a diluted non-petroleum product or just air pressure to cleanse the lense (and the reflective mirror/prism beneath it too, if it is easily accessible). I preferred nail-polish remover to clean optical discs/laser eye.
SD cards should be able to boot. However, if it is an MMC card
(multimedia card, that is detected as "/dev/mmcblkx" or something similar instead of "/dev/sdxx"), then a recent discussion in a thread here suggests that it may not bootable :
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2159487&page=2
Usually the first recommendation is "Unetbootin" to create live USB cards/flash drives. I personally prefer the native "Startup Disk Creator" application to do that. There are many other similar tools for both Linux and windows that let you create live USBs with live cd/dvd images.