Booting from Debian CD

[Mark Copper <m.copper@wayne.edu>]

I'm trying to reinstall Debian.  It's a 3 yr old PC but I put in a new
hard disk drive and power supply.  I've told the BIOS to boot from the CD,
but I get the message "disk boot failure, insert system disk and press
enter".  I tried 3 cd drives, tried both my Debian 3.0 and old 2.2 cd's,
both of which I've used successfully before (even on this box), same
result.  The BIOS recognizes each drive correctly, it appears; I've
double-checked the jumper settings on the drives.  hmmm.

What silly thing have I done?

Should I create boot floppies, return old hard disk to master position?

Feeling dumb but appreciative in advance.

Mark