Trouble booting from usb-cdrom

[stormspotter]

Hello,

I'm trying to test a remaster on a Dell rackmount and running into some problems. The remaster works fine on other computers, but can't find the usb cdrom drive to mount the image on the rackmount. (There is not an internal cdrom drive on this rackmount.)

So, I tested the same server with some unmastered versions of Knoppix. Knoppix 3.7 boots perfect using a 2.4 kernel - but then it can't see the SATA hard drive. Knoppix 3.8.2 and 3.9 both have the problem of not being able to find the cdrom. However, if I boot 3.9 with "knoppix debug" at the boot prompt, it works great! I did not do anything different during boot time - I simply typed 'exit' at each command prompt it gave me during boot time.

Does anyone have any thoughts on what the debug boot does different from a regular boot that might help it find the usb cdrom? My goal is to be able to make a remaster that will boot this server unattended. (The remaster will then be used to help us rebuild another server at a Co-lo.)

TIA,
Jacob

[stormspotter]

Ok, failing that, can anybody tell me where to find these BOOT_IMAGEs? And what would I need to do to examine their contents, are they gzipped or anything? I'm hoping I can edit the 'debug' image to make it work without user intervention.

Thanks!
Jacob