Ok, lets start from the beginning. With you computer set to boot from USB devices before anything else, does your computer go through the BIOS and boot normally. My iPod prevents my computer from finishing the BIOS and so will not boot at all. After we have found out if the mp3 player will allow the Bios to boot, how exactly did you copy the CD over to your player? Do you have a place larger enough that can store an exact copy of your player on a place writeable by linux (ext2, ext3, etc?) I would suggest making an exact copy backup of your player incase something causes the device not to be able to boot itself. I will tell you how to do it if you have the space avaiable. If your player is 30 GB then we need 30GB of space to make the backup. Lets get that far and take it from there.

Robert