Install knoppix on realy old laptop

[MrBug]

I have a realy old laptop, that does not support booting with the cd-rom. SO i tried to boot knoppix with an boot-disk. But the problem is, that i get a message that tells me, that there is no knoppix filesystem, so it only starts a very limited prompt.
I made an ext2 filesystem with a swap partition, but the message is still there. Perhaps this error is, because of the boot-disk.
What is the knoppix filesystem? ext3? Where can i get a programm to make this filesystem. Are there other ways to install knoppix on this laptop?
(Sorry, i am a noob, thx for help )

[Steve F]

On my Compaq DL360 (2 years old) I have to use the boot option 'atapicd' to keep the computer from using SCSI driver to read the CD. If I don't use 'atapicd' I get a partial boot with a failure at about 25%. It finds and starts reading the file system okay, then fails.

I also have had problems with the CD-rom drive itself in addition to the computer not being able to boot from CD because of its age. In all my cases, when I swapped in a newer CD-rom drive, the computer could read the knoppix file system on the CD (with both boot floppy and CD boot).

On one computer where I didn't swap the CD-rom drive out, I was able to install debian sarge first, then running under that OS I was able to copy the knoppix CD files to a partition. I set up LILO to boot it and then did a knoppix HD install over the debian. I think older CD-rom drives may have a problem keeping track alignment when trying to read the files from the compressed knoppix file system image during boot. When I use copy on the same drive it reads okay because the head moves from track to track in sequence and doesn't loose it's alignment. By the way, when I say older CD-rom drive, I mean drives as new as two years old wouldn't boot knoppix even when I used a boot floppy. On the DL360 in addition to using 'atapicd' I had to borrow a slimline DVD writer from another computer so I could get a successful boot from CD.

[MrBug]

Is there a bootdisk, that searches for the cd, and install knoppix automatically?

[Steve F]

Well, the bootdisk will find knoppix cd and boot. As far as installing automatically, there are a number of configuration settings during an install (to hard drive) that cannot be done automatically. You have to make choices during the install. First you have to get it to boot by one of the following ways,

Boot from the CD (your older laptop won't boot directly from CD)

Boot from floppy which will load from CD (your older laptop seems to fail when trying to read the knoppix file system from the CD. You have a bad CD or a CD drive that can't read knoppix CD)

Boot from floppy, load knoppix using new CD drive (which should be able to read the knoppix file system).
Boot from floppy and load some other distro (try morphix, knaotex, lnx-bbc, debian, etc.), then with that running you can partition, format, copy an instance of knoppix that can boot from the HD. Look at poor mans install procedures.

However you get the computer to boot up knoppix, once you do, you can run the HD install script, knoppix-installer.