Hye metguru,

The cd that you are trying to intall from, is that cd burned from the ISO image of the linux distro or an cd dump of that distro?

If you have copied the linux distro cd on to your harddisk and then burned the cd then it will not boot from that cd because when the system boots from any drive it look for the boot sector information in the first tack of the boot media so if the cd dumped and then burned it will not work.