Live cd not booting on older Hp Pavilion laptop

[Soupersauce]

Ok let me first state that I've had Ubuntu Dapper and Mandriva free 2007 running on this pc.
I've tried both the minimal and live cd versions of Gentoo 2006.1 and I've also tried the minimal for Gentoo 2006.0.
The laptop is actually an HP Pavilion XH156 running a 650 Mhz Pentium 2 with at least 256 MB of ram and a 20 GB Hard Drive (I state these even though I don't think they have anything to do with recognizing these CDs as a bootable medium.)
The problem is that even when I set my bios to search the cd drive for a bootable medium first it doesn't seem to detect it, it went straight to my hard drive. It booted my Ubuntu and Mandriva discs fine. I tested the gentoo discs on different machines (my self built AMD64 3500+ and my dad's year and a half old Gateway Pentium x86 machine) they both booted the disc fine. The discs were burnt with Nero but I didn't use the wizard as it seems to have caused problems. I also tried installing using the Ubuntu Live Disc by downloading the stage 3. Apparently I cannot get enough space to fit the tar.
So what I'm asking is that does anyone have any ideas that don't require me wasting more cd-r's (I only have lightscribe cd's and am too poor to buy a new pack anytime soon). I did my best to search the forums and look manually through the other problems people have been having but I haven't found anything that matches my situation. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

Edit: Here's some more info that might be useful...
My hard drive is currently partitioned with a swap, a home partition left over from my Ubuntu install and a completely blank ext3 partition. My other Computers are windows machines (I'd switch to Linux exclusively if it wasn't for gaming and music production). I wiped my mandriva root partition and boot record because I thought they were causing some interference (partition table is still in tact.) And using firefox with the ubuntu disc doesn't seem to allow downloading directly to the hard drive. I'm not retarded with a terminal but I'm not experienced so please don't go with the simple vague description.

[erik258]