7200/75 install fails

[Jay Savage]

First, thanks to everyone who responded to my questions about 
installing 7.5.3.  unfortunately, i had a hard drive failure on my 
eMac, so i lost the messages and couldn't respond personally.

Now, I'm trying to install YDl on a 7200/75 running 7.6 (long story) 
with a 500Mb Maxtor SCSI drive (original hardware) and a 40G Seagate 
Baracuda IV on a PCI ATA controller.  I've installed everything 
correctly--as far as i can tell--on the Mac side, and BootX comes up 
when it should, but when i click on Linux to go to the installer, the 
screen goes black, and nothing happens, no matter how long i let it 
sit.  I don't hear the CD whirring, nothing.  If I couldn't see the 
green light, I'd think I'd turned it off.  The monitor even goes to 
sleep because there's no video.

i've tried everything i can think of, including turning off all the 
Bootx options one-by-one, trying different ramdisks.  I even tried the 
2.4 (vmlinux) kernel once, just for kicks.  But still nothing, not even 
an error message.

Any ideas?

thanks,

--jay