Anything..?

I didn't intend this to be so long...

I wish I had been here a bit earlier but, I highly doubt it is your cd-rom drive.
1 Check the jumper settings and try setting then definetly ie Master or Slave instead of Cable select. If they are detected in the bios this probably wont help. use next step
2 The culprit is most likely your mainboard not the cd rom drive,
3 I would just get a nec or lite-on drive as sony drives are rebranded drives anyway. and you pay for the name sony. (ps nec and lite-on drives are $30-$40 dollars on newegg.com (sony's are not better quality) (I have used multiple sony drives and they all died a short time after about a year. with mild use. Necs and lite-ons about a year some two with extremly heavy use. (2 dvds a day everyday at least up 10 per day) and after every burn I do a bit check to make sure the disc was burned properly!!! (but typically at 8x although 16x supported (less errors))
4 Bois updates help
This is very important it says no ide channel found!!!
Third of all where is your system description (in your signiture)?!?
Are you using intel amd or what?
If intel you may have a mainboard with no ide channels, sata instead.
If you have a sata cd drive. Only the elite can help you as to this day, you can't install windows from a sata drive. <- might be a bit over board here (i think you can install linux from sata cd drive. dont quote me on this.)


Anyway on the potential solution.
Check to make sure your drivers are included on the disk.
Try a suse livecd.
Try loading knoppix ( a live cd).
both of the previous ones are very popular. Find which drivers are used and get them on the other live cds.
Typical names from the thing you look for in /dev are
dvd *dvd* cdrom cd* hd* sd*
* = wildcard (anything)
the hd and sd usualy have a single letter after the prefix (ie sd or hd)

Hi. Thanks for the reply. My drive is currently set to Slave. What did you mean by "detected in the BIOS"?
If the culprit is the mainboard, then why does that string of text I listed two posts ago work?

Guess I forgot the system description!
mobo: Intel DG965RYCK
proc: Celeron D 336
ram : Corsair ValueSelect 1280MB

I have one IDE input on my mainboard. I have four SATA inputs. My hard drive is on SATA, and my optical drive is on the lone IDE.

Where can I get a SUSE LiveCD? I just downloaded Knoppix and I'm about to try it out.

Update: I tried Knoppix. It wouldn't boot on it's own [still couldn't find the cd, drops me to a limited shell pretty quickly]. When I typed in the linux irqprobe all-generic-ide acpi=off parameter, it started doing some stuff. It spit out Disabling IRQ #11 several times [as a side note - CentOS displayed this message alot too, many times randomly throughout booting].

Then I got this:
Disabling DMA accereration for: hda [WD....] - this is my hard drive
Disabling DMA acceleration for: hdi [BENQ DVD DD DW1650] - my DVD drive!

It then tried to look for something in hda, hda1, hda2, hda3... but each file it searched took about three minutes. Obviously, I wasn't going to wait four hours for it to get to hdi, so I rebooted.

If your optical drive is the only one on the IDE cable then set it to master and make sure that it is on the end connector, not the middle one. Check your optical drive manual. I recently had a drive that had a special jumper setting if it was the only one on the cable. I tried to set it to master and it didn't work. I had to use their special jumper setting.

You should be able to find the jumper settings on a label on the optical drive.

Yeah what stress_junkie said. Make it master. I know for a fact hard drives frequently have problems being slaves by them selves so this may apply to cdrom drives if it is by it self. (wow 5 two letter words next to each other, maybe 4 my grammar is crippled)

Read rest before trying though this paragraph:
BIOS update is possible, I believe you said something about this already though. Check you bios settings turn off any bios caching or shadowing (back everything up just in case) I know my dfi mainboard didn't want to boot due to this at one point. Check a linux compatability list for your mainboard. And at last resort try to replace the drive with another drive at least temporaraly. You said the boot cd gets you a limited shell? Run dmesg maybe post the whole thing here. (I don't know the forum rules on this one so check before posting)

This list) by intel says mandriva 2007 supports your mainboard and that the 2006 version doesn't, you need updated drivers.

here is a link to the mandriva download area. Use the one cd download (it has live cd mode (for testing), this maybe the solution!!) This should just boot and just work, no problems.

This is a driver problem. You need to get the intel quick start driver kit (listed Here)

Useless junk hopes and wishes (one item maybe usefull though):
Hope this solves your problems (ps mandriva is one of the easiest to use distributions... I just couldn't get the nvidia drivers installed because I was missing the kernel sources and I couldn't find them. If I looked deeper I might have found the kernel sources -- they dont come on the 4 cd package you must download them) Also linux requires you to have cable or dsl... LOL actualy it is very usefull until you can get this to work. I have no doubt it took you 10 gigs of downloading to get as far as you have come. It took me about 150 gigs to get where I am. ( I wish the smiley had big eyes)

Okay, made it master. As far as I can tell there is no jumper settings listed on the label [it didn't come with a manual, since it was an oem drive, but the c,s,m was labeled on the drive].

Quick question, which version of Mandriva should I use? There's Gnome 1-6 and KDE 1-8.

I can't get the Intel driver kit, as I am not an organization.

Well, I've tried Mandriva KDE1, KDE8, and KDEFree - none work. They don't even work with that parameter I used in CentOS and Knoppix [it keeps displaying a "can't find module" error]. By the way, what does linux irqprobe all-generic-ide acpi=off mean, and what does it actually do? By knowing what this does, I might be able to find and isolate the exact problem.

Thanks in advance for continuing help here!