[gentoo-user] booting gentoo life cd from a firewire cdrom????

[HvR]

I have a dell x200 with the cdrom in the mediabase. 
When i put in the life cd it boots fine, but then at a
point it complains it cannot find the cdrom device.

The redhat 9.0 install cd boots fine in this configuration
The cdrom is a firewire cdrom, so i tried doing insmod on ieee1394
and some other modules but to no avail.

I also tried booting knoppix cd: same issue. 
So far only redhat and the other major OS seem to deal with my
mediabase cdrom

any hints would be appreciated.