i get the install prompt when i click on morrowind from my desktop, when i click on that it takes me to the menu for starting morrowind but has a different background,
an orc instead of the tribunal and blood moon image and then when i click play it says "cannot locate the cd rom".
before this i had downloaded the official bethesda european patch 1.2 so i think that caused the problem.
i also had 2 mods running a better bodies mod and a morrowind comes alive mod but i hadnt had any problems with either of those.

does anybody know how to fix this? if not is it possible that i could delete all my morrowind files except for my save then install it again and keep my old save by moving it to that file?

It looks, from your post, that you need to install it. Put your disc in, install the game from there (over your existing install), and then try to play it with your disc in the drive. If you have GoTY, don't patch until the end, and then just use the final Bloodmoon patch (some GoTY copies have all the patches included, but you want to run version 1.6.1820).