I don't know why anyone would wnat to use grub...

I've spent the last 4 years or so using lilo. swapped to grub becuase Debian/ ubuntu is pushing it more and more and i hate it, straight after install it won;t boot. Yet with lilo it works every time.

Sorry i cna't be help, Just wanted to moan about grub!

EDIT...

actually I can be of help.... a little.

The optical drive doesn't need to be mounted at boot time surely!? that will get taken care of once udev is run and fstab on runlevel 3 or 5.

If you want to boot off of cd... you should be able to just stick it in as normal, as normally that operation is carried out by the BIOS not the boot loader. Granted having the option their means that if you are too slow putting the disk in or what ever you can still boot off of a CD.