[Grml] Boot hangs at "Looking for CD-ROM"

[John Magolske]

Greetings,

I'm trying to boot grml_small_0.2 from CDROM on a Dell inspiron 3200 laptop.
The splash screen comes up, the informational screens F1 - F10 are viewable,
but the boot process seems to hang at the point of searching for a cdrom:
...
* Checking for USB.                     [ ok ]
* Checking for firewire.                [ ok ]
* Scanning for USB/Firewire devices.    [ ok ]
* Enabling DMA acceleration for: hda    [IBM-DTCA-24090]
* Enabling DMA acceleration for: hdc    [TOSHIBA CD-ROM XM-1702BC]
* Looking for CD-ROM in:    /dev/hdc

At this point the cdrom starts spinning...and the process hangs indefinitely.
I also tried the following boot options (individually and together), 
to no avail:

noapic nolapic pci=noacpi nosmp nodma

grml_0.7 also hangs at this same point. The md5sums verify as ok.
What other things could I try to get this to boot?

Thanks for any suggestions,

John

----

System info:

Dell Inspiron 3200 D266XT, Pentium II Intel MMX
96 Mb of RAM
Hard Drive: Generic IDE Disk Type40
Hard Disk controller: Intel 82371AB/EB PCI Bus Master IDE Controller
CD ROM: Toshiba XM 1702BC
Pentium II processor to PCI bridge: Intel 82443BX (without GART support)
PCI to ISA bridge (EIO mode): Intel 82371EB
Power Management Controller:  Intel 82371EB