I have an old Compaq that I recently installed an LG 52x24x cd-rom on (hooked it up with the EIDE & power cable, etc). The installation of windows on the hdd is corrupt and won't boot. So I specified in the bios to boot from the CD-ROM first. I've tried a Windows 2000 disc and the GParted open source partitioner live cd (haven't tried a Fedora live iso yet). I still get the same "Operating system not found on any devices. Press any key to continue" message. Basically the machine won't boot any cd I've tried.
It does detect the cd-rom and I have specfieid in the bios to freshly detect new devices on reboot. Still same result.
Any ideas? Something on google spoke of using the master and slave pins but I'm unfamilliar with how that works.