"it looks like the CD was badly connected at the time of install (wrong jumpers set)"

"the CD doesn't appear in BIOS settings"

First of all I would make certain that the jumpers and cabling are correct and that the device has _no_ recognition issues before going any further.

This alone may clear everything up. If not, have you looked in your startup log ( "I can see the CD declared at boot" ) to see what is going on at boot? The command: dmesg will show your current boot log from the file /var/log/messages. You may pipe the output through less, more, head or tail for convenience; man less, man more, man head, man tail; or view the file with any text editor.

If you continue to have problems, please post back with more information.