I have tried installing devil-linux, ark linux, and Debian on my machine (hp pavilion 6535 . . . don't laugh, it was free). With each distro, I have pretty much the same problem. It will boot the installer just fine, but when it proceeds to mount the CD-ROM, it can't do it. could this have something to do with the i810 chipset? or possibly the ancient samsung cd drive? I'm hoping that there is a way to resolve this without buying new hardware at the moment.

At boot: try typing "ide=nodma".

The BIOS does the original boot of the CD so Linux doesn't need to know how to find it. However when Linux starts a root in memory it then tries to mount the CD and does need to know how to find it. On some systems you need the above flag so it will know how to mount the drive.

I had it on my Dell PowerEdge 1300 but for some reason not on any other Dell PowerEdge I've loaded. I suspect it has to do with age of the machine as to whether it uses dma for the CD.

Edited - originally mistyped as "cd=nodma" which is incorrect.

ok, tried that. still no luck. also tried some flags listed in the boot help screen (noapic nolapic and others). It still won't mount the cdrom.

Does anyone else have any suggestions?

Have you tried to see if a bootable cdrom will work? If it does that should rule out quite a few problems.

You might also want to try and tinker with your bios a little, there might be something in there which might be preventing linux from mounting the cd drive.