Comp wouldn't install Linux - CD drive problem!

I just want to share my experience about why computers are such a pain to diagnose. I've been trying to build a computer for use at my parents house while I'm over visiting so I had a Core 2 Duo E6420 and an Asus P5N-T Deluxe with 4GB of Kingston HyperX Ram sitting doing nothing. I scrounged a 80GB SATA drive and a PATA DVD drive for use since it is just for random stuff. The optical drive works fine on other systems. I just bought a new power supply which doesn't have the 8-pin EPS connector, but has enough juice on the 4-pin 12v anyway and I don't plan on overclocking.

The damn system wouldn't complete booting. Sometimes it would hang at the ATA initialization, sometimes at USB, sometimes at Firewire, and then it would start to have kernel panics about ACPI and APIC. Linux was complaining that the CPU weren't being synced correctly.

I started pulling everything I could to check and thought it was the power supply. After a couple of hours, I remembered I had a 8x DVDRW drive from Liteon for review that used USB. Unplugging the PATA optical drive and using the USB... NO ERRORS! It is now working totally fine and I left the optical drive off for the time being.

This is why computers are such a pain when there are problems. You wouldn't think that it was the optical drive causing problems... but there you go. I got the hint from the one ATA hang, but it was a one off thing. Even so, the system is humming fine now.

What a pain.