Hello again, Gilles. I burned a new iso_usb.iso CD, then installed an
old hard disk that contains only one Windows 2000 partition. But my system
still does not boot with your CD.

I also tried booting with no hard disk at all. As before, all I get is the
"starting GRUB..." message. This proves that my boot problem is completely
unrelated to my system's hard disk partitions.

My system has a Gigabyte GA-7N400-L motherboard with an nForce2
chipset, 1500 megabytes of RAM, and an AMD XP3200+ processor.