The floppy image that is used to create the bootable CD is too big for some BIOS's. The effected systems will refuse to boot the CD if the floppy image is larger than 1.44MB. I have rebuilt the ISO a few times with a smaller floppy image. It boots but dies in initialization. I haven't hit on the right combination of modules to compile into the kernel to get gentoo to start correctly.
Try the "2002122100" livecd at http://www.gentoo.org/dyn/experimental/livecd/ on the systems you had problems with. It doesn't use a floppy image.
No go on both the 2002122100 and 2002122300 images. This issue is definately a BIOS issue on my end. The problem is I don't have an upgrade for the BIOS available to be able to handle the newer bootable CD specs. I'm sort of stuck in the land where a 1.44MB floppy image is the ONLY thing that will be read by the system BIOS. While I can't expect you (gentoo) to fix this... It's probably something that should be somewhere in your documentation.
Check out bug 19548 the image there should fix your problem
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 19548 ***
Moving these so we can remove the "Install CD" component from "Gentoo Linux". I apologize to everyone for this spam, but according to the bugzilla developers, this is the only reasonable way to do this.
