I put in numerous distributions recorded on CD-rs and they never worked. So i bought some CD-rw's they don't seem to work either. First the machine keeps spitting the discs out. Then once they stop having a war with opening the tray it just loads them then nothing happens. After the bios it just stays black. I have restarted numerous times. I have an HP Pavilion 752n with an aftermarket Western digital hard drive. Aftermarket meaning its not stock. I have recently formatted the hard drive for linux also. What can possibly be wrong.

Sounds like you need to go to the BIOS and set it to boot from the cd first before the hard drive

yeah thats what I should have done before.