Need a little help

[bigH2O]

Had a client ask me to build a machine for him. No problem. I couldn't believe what he threw at me $4500.00 worth of parts. 64GB of RAM, six 2TB hard drives. Best case, best mobo, best video card, no problem. He bought the parts and had them dropped shipped to me, so I don't have any money out of pocket. I build the system and start to install win 7 pro 64 bit.

Now the system is built, and I load the Win 7 DVD into the DVD drive, and the installation starts fine, but it gets to a point where everything is loaded into memory and ready to go and it pops up and says it needs a driver for the DVD drive before the installation can continue. WTF? It loaded all the install files off of the installation DVD, so what's the problem? I went to the manufacturer's website and downloaded the drivers. I burned a CD of the driver which the system won't recognize because it doesn't have drivers.I copied everything to a thumb drive following the instructions to try to get past this problem and the install program won't recognize any of it.

Any advice?

About the only thing I can think to do is to do a clean XP install, and then an upgrade to 7 from there, but I don't have a clean licesnse for XP that I can use.