Ok, the deal with the CD boot is probably because the system is not sure just what drive letter your system is assigning to the CD you've got it in. You can find out by booting from the CD, pressing Alt-F1, and selecting S. This will run a little program that will tell you which drive letter it's being assigned in your system. I don't know why you can't boot without IDE; I didn't have that here (scsi disk and CD; CD is too old to be bootable... or there's something hodged with my scsi card in this respect).

If you want to get the ear of the developers, go to [link|news://news.ecomstation.nl/ecomstation.support.install|the eCS support newsgroup]. I'm sure they'd be especially interested in hearing about the movie on the thinkpad...