Oh dear, then I'm afraid your snookered Paul.
Girlies, they are something aren't they?
But without them we would be snookered.
However.........
You can back up your personal stuff to cdrom but the os is a different thing entirely.
Imaging programs will not suffice as against a fully fledged XP CD regarding re-install.

the only disc i have found is microsoft works 8 will that help

To be succinct, and in a word, NO.
MS Works contains basic programs like MS Word, Excel etc, nothing to do with backup.

I have to be pefectly honest here Paul, if you can't find that disk and you want to back up in the future when your files get massive then get a new disk or order a new disk from the pc makers if your original version was OEM.