I used to be able to boot AROS from a CD on this P3-550 machine... Tried it as soon as I got the machine, and all that I've done since then is install QNX, BeOS and Mandrake Linux on it, along with Smart Boot Manager.
AROS starts booting but keeps tripping up and starting again. I get the 'Interrupts redirected, reallocating ExecBase, clearing fastmem... OK' followed by a bunch of stuff that I don't get much chance to see... IDE unit info, Floppy detected as a 1.44MB drive, then a few lines that start with 'Kbd'. That's as far as it gets - sometimes you can just see an error flash up (a guru, sometimes something about CPU defend (??) or garbage.)
Since each attempt at booting seems to get just past the stage of keyboard initialisation (I can type stuff and get what looks like debug info on keypresses echoed back for a split second) I started to wonder if it was my dodgy KVM or keyboard, so I removed the KVM and plugged my old monitor in, tried with two different keyboards, but with the same results.
Is it possible that my strange HD partition table could be to blame? (Sort of a mess, a QNX partition, two BeOS partitions, Mandrake in an extended partition, Smart Boot Manager in the MBR, which retained Mandrake's LILO MBR installation somewhere... it works, wherever it is ;-))
Does the data on the HD really matter if you're booting AROS from CD?
Tried it with the 23rd May 2003 and 13th September 2003 snapshots, and the latest (21st November) nightly build. Same results, slightly different messages.