Very Computer

I'm a newbi to Linux (after having used DOS & OS/2, I still haven't found an
OS that I'm completely statisfied with). Anyways, it seems when I picked up
a copy of "Toolkit for Linux" which containts both the sunsite and tsx-11
archives on 2 cd's (dated august '94), it came with no boot disk that
supported anything I had. Can anyone tell me where to find:
1) a boot disk that supports a Mitsumi ATAPI 4x CD-Rom
2) HD's with more than 16 heads
I have a 540 meg Conner and 730 Western Digital, and have them set to LBA
(which doubled the number of heads they had to 32, while kept the number of
cylinders below 1024 for DOS to be happy). Linux won't recognize the HD's
with LBA on, and DOS keeps getting disk read errors with LBA off. Does
anybody know how to get DOS working with LBA off or maybe a boot disk which
supports 32 heads? Again, I'm very new to this, so don't get too technical
on me.