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One of the items overlooked so far could be the system bios. I found on my test box that even after making a new partition and placing knoppix in the root of the new partition (fat32) that knoppix will not boot because the older bios does not see past a set number of gigabytes from the boot sector of the drive. Using a modern os can overcome the problem because it does not have that limitation. But since the disk is filled up past the point the bios recognizes, it will not see the other os.
My original problem was with a dell optiplex gx240 with a 120 gig drive.
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I am not sure if I would be able to accept your explanation.
When you created a new partition, did not change the bootloader ? Are still using the older 'grub' (0.97) or you are using 'syslinux' now ?
If you haven't changed the bootloader, why do you say it is a bios problem ?
If you have changed the bootloader, how could not conclude that it is not a problem of mis-configuration of the new bootloader ?
"a modern os can overcome the problem" - in what way knoppix is not a "modern os" ? Seems that you are mixing bootloader issues with OS ( linux ).
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This is from the grub manual.
18 : Selected cylinder exceeds maximum supported by BIOS This error is returned when a read is attempted at a linear block address beyond the end of the BIOS translated area. This generally happens if your disk is larger than the BIOS can handle (512MB for (E)IDE disks on older machines or larger than 8GB in general).
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There will always be the possibility of what you mentioned in grub man pages which matches with you are experiencing but the fact is that :-
1. You have already tried putting linux and minirt at hd(0,0).
2. You did not mention, but we presume that opensuse is at hd(0,5) and yet it is bootable.
Wouldn't knoppix kernel at hd(0,0), is at a smaller cyclinder compared to opensuse kernel ?
What I was trying to say is that your attempt to create a new partition (FAT32) to boot knoppix ***DOES NOT*** give you any new information. There is not new conclusion which can be drawn from it just by having KNOPPIX residing on a new partition ( more so when you are still using the same dubious bootloader ), and probably the more or less "suspicious" menu.lst configuration and syntax.
