In the end I dug out a generic x52 CD-ROM drive and it booted from the
SmartStart CD first time, obviously the SmartStart boot sectors are
more picky about the type of drives they like to be read by!

Many Thanks,
J.

On May 18, 12:54 am, "Rick F." wrote:
On 2007-05-17, VinceV wrote:

Did you burn this to a CDR? I've found that the older CD ROM drives
have a hard time with CD-RW media.

For some reason that SmartStart CD (not sure if the newer ones have
the same issue or not, but this does appear to be the case for the
v5.5 version) **MUST** be burned at the SLOWEST possible speed on
your cd burner or it will NOT work.. I and countless others have
found this out by complete trial and error -- per LC's comments..

I suspect if you try the above technique, the problem will go away!