generic system rescue diskk

I'm trying to make a generic system rescue disk. I want to do this because 
many of the main live distros, grml, gentoo, and ubuntu, have dropped 
support for kernel speech. You have to run the GUI speech in ubuntu. And 
grml is a character based distro so it won't talk at all any more.

Anyway,  I was wondering if bootcdwrite is a good tool for creating generic 
system rescue CDs. I created a 790 Mb partition  on my linux machine, did a 
base install to this partition and configured speech, and then used 
bootcdwrite to create a live CD from that partition.

It mostly works. One thing is that it doesn't work on machines with sata 
hard drives. Correct me if I'm wrong but I think the CD drive would be hda 
in machines with sata drives. I am aware that you can specify hda or hdc at 
the boot prompt but if you're blind, that's difficult. The screen reader 
doesn't start until after the kernel loads.  There must be some way to have 
it detect the CDROM drive because grml and the other live distros don't make 
you specify the CDROM drive.

I tried using "auto" but that didn't seem to work on either machines with 
IDE or with SATA drives.  Is that what auto is supposed to do?