What made me think of turning it on was the fact that there were hoards of fast-scrolling lines that read something like "Drive seek complete, status unknown." Eventually I would get an error about VFS and mounting a root at a specific block. (Please keep in mind that I know nothing about linux)

I had first thought that since my ram and the CD-rom were merged by unionfs or ramdisk or something, that somehow the addressing or usage of my ram was all screwed up by the dell bios. After I was sure that I had the most recent bios, and that the burn was good, I decided that the kernel (or whatever it is) was getting an unknown status out of the device because it needed dma to get its job done. [Now, why that is, I have no idea! Kanotix does not have this problem and they look like the same thing to me.] It was a subtle hunch, but it allowed me to treat the first half of the CDROM + RAM combination. I'm not surprised that my cheap dell toaster of a computer had such a complicated problem that was caused by something so simple.

Does the fact that my drive is a phillips DVD+- RW ring any technical bells?