[ianc]

Hardware doesn't sound like it should be a problem, although I have had some dicey issues with Asus boards in the past. The first thing to ascertain however is that the Linux CD is good. If you can successfully boot another machine off it and get further into the setup than you can on your own (without making any changes to that machine of course), then we can safely say the problem is with your machine. The fact that both of your drives are not allowing you to boot points me to your mobo.

Usually you can get into the CMOS setup program when your machine is booting by pressing the DEL or F1 key or something similar. You may not see this if your mobo displays some splash screen when it's first booting. If so, you may be able to circumvent this by pressing ESC. Check the settings in the CMOS to make sure all looks good as far as booting from CD's goes.

Also, as I mentioned before, you should check that both of your drives are jumpered correctly. Typically, an IDE controller can have two devices connected to it: a master and a slave, and your two drives are probably on the secondary IDE controller, while your HD is on the primary. Check the jumper settings on your CD\DVD drives to make sure they're correct. The drive at the end of the cable should be master. If they're set for cable select, change them to master\slave. The drives should have a little diagram printed on them at the back to tell you what jumper pins to put the jumpers on for master or slave configuration.

Try again. If still no go, check what version BIOS your board is currently at. You should see this info when you first power the board up. Check the Asus website for your model of board to see if there's anything newer available. If so, you might want to flash your mobo to the later version of the BIOS. Typically the BIOS is a relatively small program that fits on a floppy disk. Various mobo manufacturers have different ways of flashing the BIOS. Some have a dedicated program that goes on the floppy with the BIOS, others have you press a particular key when you're booting up with the floppy. The Asus website will have instructions on your particular board on how to do this.

Let us know how it goes...

ianc