I'm one of the silly ones that calls it a CDROM drive. It's a DVD drive and I can open and browse the entire DVD structure when I'm booted into Linux. I just pulled out my 64-bit laptop, and got the same error message. It's also possible that the original ISO image I downloaded from my MSDN somehow got corrupted on the way here, so I'm re-downloading it and will generate a new license for it.

As far as which bootloader to install first, I have always let Windows have its way with the system first, them let Grub find Windows and add it to the Grub menu. Windows always seems to puke when Linux has the first partition on the hard drive, not to mention the fact that Windows installer will kill Grub or Lilo.

A search on Google for the 0xc0000000f error reveals a lot of people having issues once Win7 is installed and does the first reboot, but not on the initial DVD boot. This has me befuddled.

If it won't work for me, it's not a big deal. Linux is my preferred flavor of choice.