toothandnail,
Ok, perhaps I jumped to the wrong conclusion. Here is more detail:
CD booted on 3 different machines with intel chipsets, no need to detail those.
These machines pause at boot from CD, then continue as tho the CD were blank:
MB1: ECS PT800CE-A
2.0 GHz Intel Celeron, 1 GB ram, IDE via VT8237, Award bios 01/19/03, DVD/rw K hypermedia DX082D
MB2: ECS k7vta3
1.7 GHz Athlon-XP, 512MB ram, IDE via VT8235, Award bios 04/01/05, DVD/rw Sony DRU-800A
MB3: Soyo KT400 Dragon Ultra
1.7 GHz Athlon-XP, 512MB ram, IDE via VT8235, Award bios 01/19/03, DVD/rw Samsung SH-S182M
Again, I have created the md5sum by acutally reading the CD, on each of the via machines,
and they match the published md5sum. Proving each via machine is not faulty.
I constantly play with various distros, and have multiple drives and partitions on all machines,
with various distros installed.
If I can provide any more info, or run an experiment to solve the issue,
Let me know.