Trying to boot from either the cd or a boot floppy will give an error of: VFS: Cannot open root device 08:21 Kernel Panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 08:21 I'm not sure if this happens on IDE-only systems, but the system i encountered this on had an aic7xxx-type scsi controller controlling both the CDROM and the disk. Passing `linux mem=128M' got the install rolling. Even a better error message would be enough to close this bug.
This is fixed with syslinux-1.45 in the new installer.