Here's another thing that might help .. I've got an old machine here that the kernel disables ACPI on, because it thinks (incorrectly) that the BIOS is too old. With no ACPI, it somehow doesn't seem to setup the second IDE channel properly, so I can't access the CD-ROM. Adding "acpi=force" to the kernel command line fixes it.
Here's another thing that might help .. I've got an old machine here that the kernel disables ACPI on, because it thinks (incorrectly) that the BIOS is too old. With no ACPI, it somehow doesn't seem to setup the second IDE channel properly, so I can't access the CD-ROM. Adding "acpi=force" to the kernel command line fixes it.