How to live boot old hardware diskless?

Can you tell whether I got a harddrive or software issue? A new system removed harddrives can boot and write a CD. Now I try to make old hardware work likewise, try boot with 32-bit 10.04 and following messages appears:

initramfs can not mount /dev/loop0 (/cdrom/casper/filesystem.squashfs

Also having tried quite a few other systems and distros (BSD, Haiku, Mandriva) to boot the connected components (which seem physically OK) none can boot my old hardware. Any ideas? Thanks

From ubuntu LarsOn

• It may be due to a bad CDROM drive. I found similar kind of issue here.

  From Rojan