I scored a Dell poweredge 6300 from a local pawn shop. It has the capability to boot from cd-rom, but apparently not with isolinux, which is what the debian installer cd uses. I was able to boot to UBCD411 (Ultimate Boot CD, which uses syslinux), but didn't see any option to boot to a CD (maybe I'm missing something here?). I tried using the boot floppy from this site. I didn't expect it to work (it's from the Woody era), and it did not. I got a message that says SYSLINUX ver.XXXX CBIOS boot failed. I went to http://mirrors.kernel.org/ and looked for a boot floppy image for Lenny, but apparently it doesn't exist. I did however find the boot floppy image for Etch.

To be honest, even if I did find the Lenny floppy boot image, I'm not sure how to use it to point the system to the installer CD. So, I have two questions:

1) Does anyone know of a boot floppy image for Lenny, or if I could use the Etch boot floppy image?

2) How would one boot from floppy, then point the system to the installer CD?

System info:
(4) Xeon Pentium 2 processors 500 Mhz
(6) UltraSCSI hard drives
(1) SCSI cd-rom drive
(1) SCSI dvd-rom drive
(1) Floppy drive
(1) 10/100 NIC

I'm open to any other suggestions as to how I could install Debian Lenny on this machine.

Lenny's here: www.debian.org/distrib/netinst#verysmall

Dunno if it'll work with your hardware but I've installed/booted AntiX and Debian with this method:

http://antix.mepis.org/index.php/Installation_Tips

Good luck.

Thanks, xenios, I found the Lenny floppy image. Must have overlooked it before (it's called 'linux' I think, where the Etch version was called 'boot.img'). The mepis method uses an iso image on a hard drive, and I don't have access to the hard drives (but a very handy link, goes in my file ). I'll try the Lenny boot floppy tomorrow and post back with the results.

NP, the iso on a HD wasn't what you asked for but added it as a possible fallback. Older but more appropriate:

http://linux.simple.be/debian/etch/floppy

Problem solved. Apparently it was a bad install disk. I still don't know what was wrong with this disk, as I:
1) Verified the md5sum after downloading,
2) Burned at 12x (the slowest setting k3b allowed as a choice for the media)
3) Verified the md5sum after burning,
4) The disk booted to the install menu in my laptop (I aborted at this point; I wasn't trying to install to the laptop)

Anyhoo, I burned another disc from the same iso file, to a different brand of CD, and it worked. So I'll mark this as solved, though I'm still puzzled.

For future reference, check out /home/yername/.kde/share/apps/k3b/lastlog.log to find the cdrecord command that was used. Next time, if needed, you can copy/paste it in the terminal with a slower burn setting. What counts is you kept at it and got it done... congratulations!