Problems with Core 2 Test 2

[Michael A. Peters]

First let me state that C2T1 worked beautifully - no issues at all.

Here's my hardware -

Asus A7N8X Deluxe (Athlon 2700 XP+) w/ 256 MB PC 3200

IDE Bus 0 - Master: (/dev/hda) 4GB IDE drive (Quantum Fireball -
originally from a 233 Rev A Beige G3 - it's my test install drive)

IDE Bus 1 - Master: (/dev/hdc) Sony CD-RW CRX140E
IDE Bus 1 - Slave : (/dev/hdd) Toshiba DVD-ROM SD-M1712

Generic floppy on /dev/fd0

Video: AOpen (Generic) NV17 [GeForce4 MX 440]
PCI Cards:

Adaptec AHA-2940U/UW/D / AIC-7881U (no drives attached)
Network Everywhere Fast Ethernet 10/100 model NC100 (tulip card)
U.S. Robotics 56k PCI hardware modem

Problems
-=-
The CD's (I tried CD1 and CD2) would not boot (md5sum of burned media
checks out fine)
I had deb sarge on my test drive - so I booted that and mounted the
first CD to look for a boot floppy (like I had to use to boot Mandrake
10 C.D.) - found the boot.iso - burned that, that booted.

First that hung at trying to load a USB mass storage driver. So I shut
down, detached my digital camera card reader, and tried again.

It got a little farther - but said it didn't have a driver for the media
- and asked if I wanted to load a driver. I didn't see any nforce IDE
drivers in the list - I'm assuming it's a bug.

-=-
At any rate - FC2T1 boots and installs on this hardware absolutely no
problem. Even with the flash card reader attached.

Since Mandrake Community Download 10 also has the same issue - I'm
wondering if Fedora and Mandrake are using the same mastering software
(I assume isolinux and friends) that happens to be broken with my CDROM
drive ... (RH 8/Knoppix/FC2T1/MandrakeMove/Sarge all boot me no
problem).

Is there a boot floppy anywhere I can gran to try to boot the install CD
1 that way? Anyone else with similar hardware have a solution?