The cdrom prevents booting unless WIndows has been booted and Red Hat boot is invoked without a power off. When the system hangs on a cold boot the message on the console refers to pc_cdrom is confused - lost interupt reason 0x1. Values entered on Lilo have no effect on this error. Boot's OK on windows.
We will need to know more about your hardware. For example brand/model of the cd-rom that you are having trouble with. Is it an ATAPI IDE drive or a proprietary drive?
I am using: io magic 52x cdrom on ide 2nd slot as primary(not slave) /dev/hdc It is ATAPI as far as I know The 1st ide contains 2 drives 2.2GIG each - Western Digital IWILL premium motherboard 64 MEG 60 ns EDO memory One IBM 9.1 GIG SCSI drive. More notes: This condition existed before I installed the SCSI Drive. IF I BOOT WINDOWS, AND THEN REBOOT RED HAT WITHOUT POWER OFF THE CD ROM WILL WORK. IT WILL NOT WORK FROM A COLD - POWER OFF BOOT. Hope this helps. I want eventually to get rid of the windows OS entirely.
I have the same problem with RHL 6.1 and ATAPI/IDE CD-ROM as single (master) unit on 2nd IDE controller. However, if I disable the recognition of the CD-ROM drive at the AMI-BIOS setup level (but not the controller of course!), the systems boot properly... Since I never succeeded booting an el-Torito CD-ROM with this computer, I can imagine that this BIOS version does some dirty CD-ROM initializations that DOS and WinNT reset, but not Linux... shame !
Is this still happening with the 2.2.16-22 kernel?
Closing due to lack of information.