newbie, Knoppix 3.7 not seeing CD-ROM, then no more boot

[frugalyankee]

Please bear with me, I am a total newbie to Linux, and not super knowledgable about IT.
I stumbled on Knoppix as a way to try to rescue a friend's mess on their Win XP home PC. (I am trying to get write and copy access to the NTFS partition) After downloading the 698 MB image file and burning a CD, I tried verifying that the CD would boot on one of my PCs at work and it doesn't. I get the little penguin and the after it sees a couple of hardware things it looks for the CD-ROM. I get the message "looking for CDROM in /dev/scd0" and then an error message, "can't find Knoppix file system sorry" or similar and that's it. No boot.
The system I am testing it out on is a Gateway 400 Mh Intel Pentium II, 18 GB hard drive, 312 RAM 584 SRAM, MITSUMI CD-ROM FX320S.
Did I do something wrong?

[UnderScore]

At this screen http://shots.osdir.com/slideshows/slideshow.php?release=167&slide=1 or one very similar to it, enter the following:
knoppix nodma
OR
knoppix failsafe
I hope this helps.
James

[Harry Kuhman]

Sounds like you burnt the CD right (as long as you confirmed the md5 checksum) or you would not have reached the point you did. Try booting and typing knoppix nodma as soon as you get the boot prompt (or type f2 at the boot prompt to stop knoppix from comtinuing on at this point). Unfortunatel, you might need a different "cheat code", but I know of no good way to determine exactly what code or codes each system needs. Still, nodma may be all you need here.

Other thoughts: a bad download could cause this (thus the md5 sum, don't just download again, trust me on this). Also, some people have seen booting problems when the disc is burnt at high speed that go away when the CD is burnt at 4x.

[frugalyankee]

Harry and James, thanks. I tried it on another PC and it worked fine, also on the Compaq presario I am trying to save. I thought maybe it was an issue with Joliet vs ISO file type but that does not seem to make any difference. Thanks again