This morning I have tried a whole slew of things to get this to work.

Changed thumb drives - didnt work.
Unplugged the hd's to get the cd to spin up - boot error
changed all sata cables on the computer
changed the order of cables to devices
removed the ide drive
installed a ide cdrom
tried another cdrom with the os
had my neighbor burn another cd rom
...or tried to. I have three 9.04 isos from three different download sites and
all three have errors when writing. Errors on each of my three machines and on
my neighbors two machines. Im downloading another.

I tell you what, I have never had so much difficulty in so many ways just trying
to get a computer running.