just got the new pc delivered to my door yesterday, I was excited and I wanted to get it up and running with a fresh linux install on it.

4 hours later, 3 distros (Ubuntu 6.06, Gentoo 2006.1, Debian 3.1) and a FreeBSD trial later, they were all unable to mount the cdrom at install. I looked at the fstab after the failure to mount and nothing was listed besides ram and proc.

It's a new Intel Core 2 Duo paired with a DP96LT Intel board, a standard desktop setup with 2 SATA hard drives and 2 optical DVD and CDRW/DVDRW respectively. I'm not sure if any other information about the setup is pertinent.

Any ideas on how to remedy this would be extremely helpful.

make/model of the drives would likely be helpful hon ...

Go to the System BIOS and check if CD-ROM is there as the first booting device. Or else, you can set it to and LINUX will get the boot image to the RAM properly. After the installation, set back the first boot device to the Hard Disk on which the LINUX is. I think this should fix the problem.

Hmm this could be a wide range of problems. I would start with the basics. I know it sounds dumb, but go back through and verify that power and bus lines are plugged into the devices and showing up in the BIOS like VirtualRanger was saying. If that confirms we will move on to trouble shooting the kernel.

dmesg|grep -i cd

look around through these messages and see if your CD rom device was even detected if not there may be a bus module that isn't getting loaded.

let me know what you find.