I just booted the CD on a spare computer and it worked for me here although I used vi but that should not matter. Editing the file to change the root really is not going to make much difference anyway you are going to store these files on the HD right? In which case just leave the file as is the support for PHP is already turned on in the httpd.conf and do as I suggested in my post above make a directory on HD and serve yourself web pages from there.