RH 7.2 - After Install ... No CD-ROM support

Hello all. This one really has me puzzled. This is the first time this has happened to me... all the other (prior) versions of RedHat worked fine (in this regard). I purchased a new motherboard (133MHz bus & RAM as well as ATA 100) that has an enbedded/onboard VIA C3 CPU on it (ostensibly Intel compatible according to the dude in the store), in addition to on-board video/sound/NIC. I downloaded RH7.2 from the RH web-site so that it would work with all the new hardware. It booted from the CD just fine, and installed just fine. Then, after re-boot..... when trying to mount the CD-ROM.... it says... "/dev/cdrom is not a valid block device" I ran GNOME to see if I could run some other programs to "troubleshoot" the situation, and I got several messages to the effect... "make sure that CD-ROM support is compiled into the kernel..." ... well, in order to re-configure and re-compile the kernel.... you need to copy the source from a CD..... (which cannot happen). Has this happened to anyone else? Is this a bug? Is there a problem with the kernel in the RH install download from the web-site? Anyone have any ideas as to what to do? The hard drive is on IDE0 and the CD-ROM is on IDE1 - both jumpered as "master". THANKS IN ADVANCE !!!! Ray Harris