Don't be too afraid of the bios: even if you screw up the settings completely, you can just remove the bios battery for 15 minutes or so and you'll just have to re-set the clock and wait for the drives to be autodetected. The default settings will work just fine for Linux and Windows, just make sure that the bios tries to boot from CD first.

But I suspect that once you've got the burn right, you'll be OK.