Where do I start...

I've recently been having alot of troubles with my system,
random reboots. Upon the machine rebooting on its own when it searches for boot medium in the cd, and dvd drives they intermitantly(sp?)
click, then it boots from the hard disk normally.

Im not sure if I have a heat problem with the video card, or the cpu is overheating at times...

I thought I would try taking the cd and dvd drives out to see if that eliminated my problem. It didnt seem to help.

So last night I try my first kernel compile, 2.6.8.1..
It went okay untill I went to boot to the new kernel,
got a kernel panic...Guess I didnt include my file system type.

Anyhow- my slackware install seems to be hosed now, cant boot it.
I figured I would just re-install slackware, and recompile my kernel again,
wrong.. Ive put my cdrom back in place and now I cant get it to boot from CD...Ive tried linux boot cd, aswell as windows.

I tried changing the jumper on the cdrom from master to slave.
I made sure 'boot from cdrom' is the first boot option.
I even tried making 'boot from cdrom' the only option.

No matter what I do when I start it up, the cdrom light comes on, but it boots from the harddisk...

Help please!

In the bios right? Try booting linux off a floppy boot disk, load the cdrom drivers then mount the cdrom and install from there?

I'd flash the BIOS too.