Okay, I downloaded and MD5'd Knoppmyth, then burned it to CD. I'm familiar with Debian (running sarge on my desktop) and other distros (Slackware on my server and I frequently use Knoppix to diagnose Winders boot problems) so I'm not a total noob or anything. When I boot from the cd I don't get the selection menu as mentioned in the wiki, I get and error "Reb: command not found" and it boots to a root prompt. I looked in the specified directory (I'm at work right now and don't have the new box in front of me and I frankly don't remember the directory) and couldn't find the command, but why is it missing? I'm trying to auto install on a fresh machine (well, old parts) and I am confused. Any ideas?

Note that as far as I can tell the cd boots correctly up to that point.

Sounds like a bad burn. When you get the initial boot screen boot with the options "expert testcd".

Thanks, but I got it sorted last night (too lazy to post about it then, I guess). Turned out to be a hardware issue. Evidently the ancient cd-rom that I pulled out of the junk box didn't like what I was doing with it. The new dvd burner showed up yesterday, so I installed it and booted from the cd and everything ran fine. Gotta do some config yet, but installation sure is painless.