I have an oldish (probably 4-5 years old) IBM PC. I previously installed various Linux distros but had problems with a dodgy CD drive.

I bought a new CD/DVD drive which works fine except I can't boot from it. The BIOS picks it up fine and lets me select it in the boot list. I can boot Debian from the hard disk, mount a CD from the drive and access it. When I boot up, I can see & hear the PC checking the CD drive for a bootable CD before it boots from the hard disk.

Anyone have any ideas? I've tried with a number of known-good CDs. The drive is a Benq model 16508-0G2 manufactured in November 2003, internal IDE configured as a slave on the same IDE bus as the HDD (master).

Three things occur to me as a starting point for troubleshooting. (1) Flash your bios with the latest version, it wouldn't hurt anyway if it hasn't been done in a while. (2) Flash the disk player with the latest firmware, even if the player is new there might still be a newer firmware available. Firmware needs to be updated every now and then, to maintain compatability with the newer recordable CD formulations. (3) Swith the jumpers on the back of your HDD and CD player to the "CS" option (computer select... I think?), it work for me once when I was having a similar problem. Anyway, just some ideas.