Lee, Thanks for the hints. BIOS left me as confused as ever, but, luckily, this is a machine with a working centos install; a quick look at /var/log/dmesg clued me in. What was really messing me up was that cdrom is hdd with cdrom1 on hdc; this is *really* counterintuitive for me, like a car door that locks by pulling the button up instead of pushing it down...