Captain's Log on Quest

Okay, not quite captain's log.
My office mate has been working on this operating system called Quest, and I'm keeping a record for him about what happened. He had been testing the OS on a virtual machine, and yesterday he decided to try it on real hardware. He found a reasonably recent hardware with APIC support in the lab. He would burn a CD-R, run upstairs, something goes wrong, write down some diagnostic on a piece of paper, run downstairs back to the office, change some code, burn a new CD-R, and run upstairs.
I hate to see CD-Rs being thrown into trash at an incredible rate. After all, CD-Rs are supposed to last for 100 years; whether they still preserve any data or not at that point is an entirely different question. Since each image is small (~2MB), I suggested burning multi-session CDs instead. He tried but couldn't get it to boot. I don't have any other ideas.
Today he bought some CD-RWs, which is an improvement. He also brought his laptop and stayed in the lab most of the time, which cuts the turnaround time a lot. When I visited him, he showed me a strange error that he fixed.
There is a static char arena[1000000]; in the code which is used for rudimentary memory allocation. He found out that if he did not initialize this arena to zero, then the code that initializes this memory with free list pointers would have page fault, accessing memory at some outrageous location (this is typical of array out of bounds problem somewhere else, polluting the arena).
I told him to try to memset to 0x5A instead. It will give us a clear indicator of what's wrong. He burned the CD-RW (had to erase the whole disk first) and booted it up. Lo and behold! The whole text-mode screen was then filled with bright green Z with pink background (thank goodness I didn't suggest 0xA5, or it would be filled with *blinking* purple Ñ on green). It seemed that the arena overlapped with text mode video buffer.
Another lesson learned about writing operating systems: double check special hardware physical address mappings.