boot problem, maybe related to CD drive

[johngvqa]

I am getting an error during boot. Knoppix initially sees the CD drive and HDD, giving their model ID, but after coming to the line: "Looking for CDROM in: /dev/scd0, it pauses for some time then the scd0 flips quickly through some other names and then I get the error: "Can't find Knoppix file ssytem, sorry. Dropping you to a (very limited) shell.
The CD works fine in another computer so I'm thinking that the problem may with this CD drive: Mitsumi FX320M
Any diagnosis or suggestions

[rrfish72]

Use one of the cheat codes at the boot prompt. F2 to see some of them. knoppix nodma might work out.

[johngvqa]

Thanx. The discussion section was off-line and the knoppix.org info that I found was in German. So, I googled knoppix cheats and found a copy elsewhere.
atapicd did the trick and it's running -- though very slowly on this computer. It's an old PII 350 w/ 96 MB RAM and a 32X CD drive. But it's the only one with enough idle time to experiment with and it's very similar to the computer that I'm considering installing Linux on and using as a file and e-mail server and as a portal to our DSL connection.