i have red hat 9 installed with the GRUB bootlaoder. i want to boot into phlak from a cd and install it to my second hard drive. ever since ive had grub on my machine it wont boot cds. i set my bios to boot from cd, then restarted and it says Boot form CD... then goes straight to grub. how would i boot to a cd.

What you've done is right, but if the CD is not bootable, it won't boot, so control is then passed to grub. Booting from CD has nothing to do with Grub.

Check the CD's make sure they are bootable, try the install CD from which you installed you Linux Distro. or even a windows CD. If these don't work then its a problem with your CD drive or BIOS.

if it's going to grub, then it's skipping the cd, or possibly the cdrom is not spinning up quick enough. recheck that the bios boot order is set to boot from cd first, hardrive second. another thing to check is your media, be sure the media is bootable. if by chance the message you posted (boot from cd...) finishes up w/hit any key, then try that. the last thing i can think of is some bios have a quickboot, or fastboot, option. w/that enabled, i have seen the boot process miss the cd because it didn't spin up quickly enough. check for that option, if you have it and it's enabled, disable it.
good luck.

last resort...disable your hd and boot to cd

http://www.openqnx.com/PrintArticle213.html try goin here i checked it out ... it sounds cool.. there is a program that will load the .iso file from the HD instead of the cd drive!

Did you check your md5sum after downloading and use the proper burn to transfer to CD?