Debian Installation: Strike F1 to retry boot

Hi all,

I have a Dell Precision 450, with almost a blank HD (formatted recently).

Something weird /stupid is happening, and I am totally clueless as to what is going on:

- I put the debian installation DVD (latest stable release that I downloaded yesterday) on my machine, start it, and no luck. It keeps saying hit F2 to try rebooting. Basically, it is as if DVD is not bootable (it does not even show the debian installation at all, simply failing to boot).

- I thought, there might an issue with the DVD reader, changed it, same thing.

- I thought there might an issue with the DVD, put the DVD on another machine, it booted fine (could see the installation start)

- Then, I put the windows XP Pro installation DVD on the machine, and it boots up fine (can see the installation window).

- Then, thinking that there might be something wrong with the debian installation, I tried the "Fedora Core 8" installation DVD, and that again failed to boot.

Any idea what is going on and/or what I can do to fix this?

Any help is appreciated.