when i load up a gentoo liveCD it gets to a point where its trying to mount the cdrom (i believe) and then reboots. i've also tried loading it in debug mode- it gets to a prompt before its mounted the CD and when i type:

mount /dev/cdroms/cdrom0 /mnt/cdrom

it says "mounting read only" etc and then reboots, so i'm pretty sure its a cdrom related problem.

i've also tried running geeXbox and mandrake and it does the same. note i actually got mandrake to go through an install and now when its booting up to xwindows it then does the reboot, i suspect its trying to mount the drive somewhere.

i've also tried changing the cdrom drive, still the same. also put the cdrom drive as pri master, pri slave, sec master, sec slave, all the same. with or without the hard drive attached.

i suspect its a motherboard/ide controller related problem then? or could it be something else.

from what i remember:

celeron 566
via (?) motherboard (should be at 66MHz to run a celeron 566)
2x256MB SDRAM (100MHz)
LG CDR/RW drive
also have in the box:
PCI SATA controller controlling 200GB HD
Intel ethernet card
onboard sound
Hollywood mpeg decoder card
S3 virge AGP graphics card

i'll try and do a lspci and give more detailed specs, eg the onboard IDE controller


thanks,
A

i've also tried using the following flags when booting gentoo:

nohotplug, noapic, nodetect and ide=nodma

i've basically sorted out the problem with the cdrom- i changed cdrom drives to the original that i got with the box and it works ok now. its some weird device conflict i guess. i still have issues with it randomly rebooting sometimes, i tweaked a few bios settings (PnP and ECC options for ram), not sure what it did but it seems reasonably stable now. its just hard to tell when you don't know what the problem really is so if anyone has suggestions about what the cause is please let me know.

could it be a problem with power supply? is it possible that the voltage needs to be boosted to support all the devices in the computer (i have 2 hard drives, a pci lan card, pci graphics decoder, agp graphics card, cdrom + pci sata controller installed)?