Fatal exception in interrupt

I can't see this problem discussed anywhere but apols in advance if it's a known issue...

I have a LiveCD of gparted that works fine in one of my machines but in another it gives a Kernel Panic. This machine is a Pentium III (IIRC) 450MHz machine with 2 hard drives. I get to the 'options' menu, don't add anything extra, then hit 'OKAY'. The CD spins for a couple of seconds then nothing seems to happen for about a minute. Then I am back on the text/console screen with a Kernel Panic message. The top lines I can read say

Process Swapper
Stack
Call trace
<...> cdrom_start_read_continuation+0x0/0xb0 ...
...
...
...
EIP [<...>] ide_execute_command
<0> Kernel panic - not syncing
Fatel execption in interrupt

Any thoughts?

Thanks, Michael