this Compaq is a small form factor box, Celeron 1.7, 20Gig HD, CD ROM, 128Mb of ram.

It runs XP fine, but I don't want XP on it.

I try to boot from CD and it starts, but halts on "Loading grub, please wait.............."

The CD drive works, at least in so far as in XP it'll open the CD up..........

I've tried with two versions of Kanotix (one of which installed fine on my lower spec desktop).

I suspect the CD drive is at fault, but does anyone have any other ideas or experience? Anyone know of a
(cheap) source for replacement drives for these (they're laptop type, H-L DataStorage, part number CRN-8243B) in the UK?