"They're coming to take me away -- haha!"

I've stood on my head and tried to get this Mandrake 7.0 to fly on my Linux
workstation box and I'm completely baffled.  The box's harddrive has IBM
disk manager -- because once upon a time it was in a PC that didn't support
2 gig sizes.  I decided that it wasn't about to boot on the CD on it's own
(evidently not an ATAPI CD ???) and I was going to need a boot disk.  I d/l
the CD one and have spent ?? times trying to get it to write a boot disk.
It was always hanging up when it was doing it -- I never had these problems
with RedHat . . . but anyway.  I then downloaded rawwritewin and used it to
create a disk.  That finally worked, so I pop it in and got boot failure.
Ok -- I'll ftp that file instead of letting Netscrape (intentional
spelling) mangle the file . . . now that'll work.  I pop it into the box
and now I get as far as "SYSLINUX 1.48 MDK-7.0 Boot failed" -- which was
farther than before . . presumably because it had snagged it in an ASCII
format.  

I pop the CD in on my main system (NT/PII-400) and it loads fine . . . at
least to the point it wants to start doing stuff.  I'm not about to disrupt
my bread/butter PC for a install.  I was going to see if it would boot to
floppy on another PC, but I forgot I already snagge the CD out of it.  UGH!   

Any suggestions?   

-- Bradley Miller