Knoppix 3.4 won't boot??

[DownloadThis]

I'm having trouble booting into Knoppix from my cdrom drive.

I set my cdrom as the first bootable device. I restart with the cd in the drive. I get to the main Knoppix screen (with the logo and message telling me to hit enter to boot, etc..). I hit enter.
The next screen I see has the linux penguin in the top left hand corner. (i've seen this screen before. This is where it detects my hardware, etc..).

Except, the screen stays completely blank (except for the penguin). Nothing happens. My cdrom stops spinning. Its just stick there with a little blinking cursor.

I have 2 cdrom drives. In the bios, i have tried to boot first from each one (still no luck).

I have even disabled my harddrives so that the *only* thing that boots is my cdrom drive.
Same thing. Keeps getting stuck at the penguin.

My hardware configuration:
Asus A7V8X-X motherboard
Athlon XP 2600+
1GB Crucial RAM
ATI 9200 Vid Card
Promise HDD Controller (i'm not using RAID. I'm just utilizing the "extra" 2 IDE ports).

Has anyone come across this?

I am using the latest version of Knoppix "KNOPPIX_V3.4-2004-05-17-EN.iso" (i have verified the MD5 hash and it checks out).

I am downloading a previous version of Knoppix to see if that works now. But i'm wondering if its my hardware configuration that is somehow messing with Knoppix).


Thanks.

 

[daveshel]

I'd say that is hardware. That's one of the things I like about Knoppix, its use as a hardware troubleshooting tool. I have not seen a system on which it will not run.

 

[DownloadThis]

same thing happens with the older version of Knoppix.
This has got to be hardware related in someway, right?


The way my drives are setup:


*Main HDD IDE Port on Motherboard*
HDD 1 (system)
HDD 2 (data)


*Main CD IDE Port on Motherboard*
CDR/DVD
DVDR

*Promise HDD Contronller - Card is in a PCI Slot*
HDD 3 (data)
HDD 4 (data)


When my computer boots, it recognizes my 4 drives in this order:

Primary Master - HDD 1 (system)
Primary Slave - HDD 2 (data)
Secondary Master - CDR/DVD
Secondary Slave - DVDR


It then goes to my HDD Controller and detects my 2 additional drives.

At this point, it either boots to windows, or to the Knoppix CD (which is what it is currently set to do).

Knoppix logo screen...
penguin....
thats it. Stuck at the penguin.

 

[daveshel]

Try disabling your HDD controller in the BIOS just to see if you can boot.

 

[DownloadThis]

Tried that also and still nothing.

Just as a test, I downloaded/burned a copy of Gentoo's live cd. Gave me an error about not finding a certain kernal loop. ??

weird stuff... i really need to be able to boot into knoppix, as i'm going to be without a system drive for a few days and want to have access to the internet and my music.

 

[coolred]

Not sure if you'll mind me doing this, but since I am very new to linux, and am on dialup, I went otu and bought a book that included a slightly moddified version of knoppix. I managed to get it to boot a couple times, but I have been working on my computer the past few days, since I had to do a reinstall of XP after a MB upgrade. ANyways, now when I try to boot knoppix, I get to the penguin screen, with an error staing it only found 1 processor(dual processor board, but only one for now)I had gotten this before. And then it should continue on booting, but now it won't. One thing you could try is typing "expert" at the boot logo and see what that says while its booting, to see if it helps at all. I did and I got a lot of info I didn't understand, but most of it related to the hard drives. Some stuff about the DMA settings being wrong, and it constantly says it "lost interupt". Not sure what exactl my problem is, but it seems hardware related.

After booting and typing expert it goes through a lot of stuff and then seems to stick at this

Scanning for harddisk partitions and creating /etc/fstab.....