I'm at the end of my tether. To solve one issue I need to solve another, and the chain never seems to end. I did a net install of Linux (Debian) earlier today and everything seemed great, until I shut the Linux down to get some sleep. When I tried to boot, it went straight to the CD-ROM (the drive was empty, btw). I didn't think it was an issue, so I just restarted, went into BIOS->Advanced options (forget the exact text) and setup my boot configuration (HD first). I restarted, and low and behold it skipped past the hard drive and went straight to CD. A little miffed, I changed my boot settings via bios yet again, this time leaving the CD entirely off the list. AGAIN it went straight to CD. THE ONLY WAY I CAN BOOT LINUX IS TO PHYSICALLY UNPLUG MY CD-ROM FROM THE MOTHERBOARD! It works fine if there's no CD-ROM. It's configured as SLAVE on the same IDE connector as my HD. I think this has something to do with the boot program Debian installs - the boot selector. I don't know what to do - I need my CD-ROM (of course) and know better than to hot-plug it after booting (I don't need a fried motherboard).

Show me /etc/lilo.conf

which boot loader is in use? LILO or GRUB? but it seems awfully strange that it won't boot if the CD-drive is connected.... when you say it does not boot, does it even try to load the kernel image?? if it does get to atleast trying to load the image, it might be that the CD drive is getting wanky....

also, when you say that the drive is set as a slave, do you mean a switch/jumper on the drive or the place on the IDE cable? or both?

you could try to set the drive as master on the secondary IDE....

I had both my Debian and Ubuntu machines set to boot off the CD first, but when they found no CD, they skipped to the hard drive. Is your CD drive empty when you try to boot up? When it finds no CD, does it fail to go to the hard drive?

If your BIOS are configured properly, it's probably a problem with your boot loader (LiLO or GRUB, there should be some sort of message when you boot up as to which you're using).