All the CD images that i've seen have been bootable by the BIOS, but the earlier
ones lacked some support in 9load (and 9loadlite) for getting the
plan9.ini from the cdboot partition, and offering the CD as a plan9
second stage boot device.

Certainly the log you showed here is just what you get in that case.

The boot images i fetched from the download for several days
after russ announced it suffered the same problem.  After burning
a CD from one of those, and finding it still failed, i checked the bootdisk.img in the image and
it seemed to be old.  The file's mtime was still 2nd may,
and strings(1) on the 9load within bootdisk.img
showed too few instances of the string
`cdboot' to be the new version.

Late last night and overnight I set about building a revised version
for the master of the Vitanuova Plan 9 CD, using a bootdisk.img that I changed myself,
with 9load and the kernels built by me yesterday (thus having
the right support).  That didn't work either, but only because,
as I eventually discovered today, I'd somehow managed to update 9pccd.gz and
9pcflop.gz in bootdisk.img but the new 9load hadn't been copied
even though I was certain I had copied it.  That CD when booted
produced, once again, similar results to the log you sent to the list.
Several hours ago, I built a new VN CD image AGAIN and THIS
time I made sure I copied the updated 9load (or 9loadlite).

Success.  It boots, finds the plan9.ini in the cdboot
partition on the CD, and offers to run or install from the CD;
and both options work (on a Thinkpad 600 I had to test).

I thus suspect that for one reason or another the bootdisk.img in
the downloadable CD image still has got the old 9load,
or hadn't got it until recently if it has changed recently.
If I have time shortly I'll try downloading it again to check.