I have a P4 with an IDE DVD burner as the single optical drive. I think it's just old enough the mobo engineers didn't consider supporting OS's on DVD. This seems to be a limitation of many systems of this vintage and older, but now Windows and several bulky Linux distros (Ubuntu Studio) are only available as a DVD image. I know the first step is flashing the BIOS with the most current version, but development on these BIOS's usually stopped a while ago.

Is there any utility I can put on a flash drive, floppy, or even on a CD in a second optical drive that will get the machine up and running and allow me to initiate an install from the DVD?

I believe Smart Boot Manager or PLoP may work. I've never had any problem with this before, even on my old machines though. If I could install from CD, I could install from DVD.

I have had pentium II computers,
that wouldn't boot DVD's, only cd's.

But ' Smart Boot Manager ' was the easy solution :
http://linux.simple.be/tools/sbm

Thanks, looks like just what I needed.