Booting Knoppix 3.8, the pain, and a question (2 CD drives)

[Megagun]

I still remember when I first tried out Knoppix 3.2.. I liked it. I liked it a lot. Especially Fluxbox...

So today, I decided to give Knoppix 3.8 a spin.. downloaded it, burned it, and rebooted. Immediately I found out that my fast, 50x CD-Rom drive didn't boot it, but my slower, 32x speed CD burner did...

I waited until Fluxbox showed up... and waited... and waited... and waited.. Hell. I waited 15 minutes (that's right! FIFTEEN MINUTES!) until it FINALLY finished booting. Hell. Even my Windows 2000 boots faster than that. Even Knoppix 3.2 does it in less than half of Knoppix 3.8's time..

Eww'ed away by Fluxbox' default style, I went on to switch it... This is exactly the moment my whole liking for Fluxbox faded away. It switched to a new style the moment I selected it in the list... As a result, it got into an infinite loop between what looked like Merleykay and Lemonspace... There was nothing to do abotu it, so I rebooted my PC into Windows 2000 again.. Hurray for 3-minute booting time...

In 15 minutes, my whole liking for both Knoppix AND Fluxbox faded away..

Now for my actual question: how do I let Knoppix boot off my faster, 50x CD-rom drive? It's really a pain to have a nice OS boot that slowly, you know.. I can't give you much info about the hardware part, but I know for one that the LED of my 50x cd-rom drive never blinks on bootup... I'm also NOT able to select my 50x Cd-rom drive to boot from in BIOS settings...

Thanks for your time... Now let's hope I can regain my liking for Knoppix and Fluxbox again...

[UnderScore]

You need to enable DMA. DMA enabled by default can be problematic and it causes many users to have Knoppix fail to boot so that is why it is turned off by default. See http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtopic.php?p=79762#79762 and http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtopic.php?p=80833#80833.

At the knoppix boot prompt type:
knoppix dma

If that fails to work, at the command line for hard drives:
hdparm -A 1 -c 1 -d 1 /dev/hda

For CDROM/DVD/CDRW drives:
hdparm -c 1 -d 1 /dev/hdc

I hope this helps.
James

[sd5867]

The command lines are not going to get your CD to boot from the 50x, but it may help with the problems that you are having after booting.

You said that your bios doesn't let you select which CD-Rom to boot from, double and triple check it, it is often over looked. after you have done that, and it is still not working, reconfigure your jumpers on your CD-Roms or physically switch your drives, more than likely it will only boot from the master drive. Simply by setting the 50x as master and the other as slave should solve your problem.

SD

[Harry Kuhman]

You said that your bios doesn't let you select which CD-Rom to boot from,....
My BIOS doesn't let me select which CD drive to boot from either .... but it turns out that I can just put a bootable CD in either CD drive and (as long as I don't have a bootable CD in the other drive also) it will boot.