How can I force one of two KNOPPIX filesystems to be detected

[fergus]

I have a KNOPPIX boot stick and a KNOPPIX boot laptop.
If I insert the stick into the laptop and fire the laptop up and visit Boot Order I can require the stick to be detected.
(i.e. perfectly normal KNOPPIX practice for many of us.)
However there then seems to occur a kind of "search" and although the stick was initially engaged, it is the laptop's KNOPPIX system that is detected and utilised thereafter.
Can I force the stick to be the platform that is used?
(The point of doing this is that I want to mess about with the laptop's filesystem - and so I want it to be "dead" not live while I do this.)
Thank you!

[szzsqing1]

If you look at /init file of Knoppix you will see the reason. Init file accomplishes this:

# Its purpose:
# 1. Mounting CD, DVD, Flashdisk or network drive,
# 2. unifying read-only compressed file system and ramdisk or file overlay,
# 3. give control to the real sysv init, which then continues to work like
# we booted from a single disk partition.

Init file is part of the initrd (in a running Knoppix OS it is: /init). You have to edit initrd to edit init file. The problem is that Knoppix's busybox (which is also part of initrd) does not support UUID detection. Instead, it uses the notations like /dev/sda, /dev/sdb ... But this method is not reliable: it can produce problems in case of multiple internal disks, external drives (USB stick) if more of them contains Knoppix OS because the first found instance will be used. The ideal solution would be that Knoppix use a busybox version that supports UUID detection so that can be applied a cheat code to give the UUID of boot device. Should be done a feature request...

But even in present situation you can solve this problem if you do not use ISO boot. Look at Knoppix cheatcodes.

### Configuration / Persistent image ###
knoppix knoppix_dir=KNOPPIX Directory to search for on the CD.

So, you have to rename your KNOPPIX directories with unique names and give the desired name as boot parameter. Of course, in case of Knoppix ISO this is impossible.
You can use this solution only if extract the ISO content and use your own boot parameters.
For example the ISO content is copied to a USB stick and you boot Knoppix with GRUB2 installed to that stick. And the boot params are given in grub.cfg file.

[szzsqing1]

Rectification: in case of ISO boot you can resolve the problem, too. You can specify the ISO image file as boot parameter:

knoppix bootfrom=/dev/sda1/KNX.iso Access image, boot from ISO-Image

So you can rename the ISO files or put them in directories with unique names.

[don999]

You might also try to use the cheatcode fromhd

like

knoppix fromhd=/dev/sda1

On my asus eeepc 900a laptop, I can boot from different filesystems (internal HD, SD card reader, usb drive) using the BBS (bios boot selector) hitting ESC on startup,

however, that only controls the boot code. To actually select which one that knoppix uses, I have to use the fromhd parameter and I can switch between them using fromhd=(sda1, sdb1, or sdc1) (sda1 is internal, sdb1 is SD card, sdc1 is usb drive. if the SD card isn't there, the usb moves to sdb1)