I can't boot the Slackware 12 install CD on an older Gateway (Athlon 650MHz, Kadoka motherboard)). The BIOS boot order has the CD-ROM first (of course). Right after the second BIOS screen, where the OS should load, all I get is a generic "Boot Failure - press any key to try again" message which appears to be generated by the BIOS (not by the installer). The activity light on the CD-ROM will flash for a second during this time, but that's it.
I am also unable to boot from the CD using the Smart Boot Manager (sbootmgr.dsk) on a floppy. The SBM loads, but it finds about 20 entries of "Removable" and 6 entries for "CD-ROM" - of course, of the latter, none of them will boot. They all pause for a second after hitting Enter, then I receive "Disk Error! 0x01."
I've tried different CD-R media and a different (newer) CD-ROM drive - no dice.
Strangely enough, this same system will boot and run the latest DBAN and Knoppix 4.0.2 without any problems.
This same Slackware 12 install CD will boot fine on my new-ish laptop (Core2Duo), so I'm pretty sure the CD is fine and is not corrupt. I burned the ISO only after checking the MD5s on the downloaded files, and I burned it with Nero as I have in the past without incident. Been using Slackware since version 7, so this is definitely not all new to me.
Any ideas?