hey, i hit this one too, there's so many things that can go wrong. there are a couple things to check. if the ide cords (the one that connects the hard drive and cd-rom have master and slave on them try setting the jumpers to cable select. some new computers actually decide what's master and what's slave simply by which part of the cable it's plugged into. if not, make sure that you have your hard drive and the cd drive on seperate ide cables. i'm not sure if this is on all systems but on mine i can't boot from a slave device, so if your hard drive is set as master, and u'r cd is set as slave on the same cable, or another then the cd won't boot. that would also explain the fact that the drive dosen't even spin up. the driver is what tells the cd drive to autoload when a cd is put it, so if there is nothing telling the drive to check for a cd it wouldn't spin (if its set as a slave drive, it would be ignored and would not spin up) this is how it is in my computer so hope it helps
that was a lot, so here's a recap if you had trouble following that. check inside your computer. if the cords have master and slave written on them then make sure all jumpers on all drives connected to ide cables are set to cable select (the settings are on top of the drive) if they don't say master and slave make sure the cd drive and the hard drive are both set as masters and do not hook them up on the same cable, positively sure that they are on seperate cables. (so many things to mention) also, check the top of your hard drive, on most, the master and single setting are the same, but on others there is a setting if it's the only drive on a cable, and a different one if it's a master, so if they are seperate on your hard drive, make sure it's set to master or single depending on your setup. sorry if i got too wordy but i tried to explain just about everything cus i don't know how much you know about computers