I've edited this post to better reflect the current state of affairs... The original text is below. You may want to skip to post #2, though!

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Hi, let me start by saying I'm really sorry, because this is going to be as dumb as you've ever gotten. I know, because I've been looking all over this forum for some guidance, and everyone's higher up the food chain than I...

I am trying to start Knoppix 3.9 on a Pentium 4 with some hard drive partition problems. (All partitions are visible using TestDisk in Windows 2000, but I can't get the partition table / MBR to rebuild correctly, at least not so far... so here I am.)

I've never so much as looked at a Linux screen in my life. So I'm just going to describe what I get, and hopefully someone will be able to drag me up a rung or two...

So I put the ISO CD in my drive, boot successfully, hit RETURN as instructed, much loading and verifying of hardware, one "FATAL" error in the Kernel ("modprobe: could not read /lib/modules/2.6.11/kernel/drivers/input/evdev.ko : not a directory") twice, but then it carries on, says "Starting X11" I believe is the last bit of text, then I get what I presume is a splash screen, earth + spaceman + what looks like a very large play/RW/FF bar, and a lovely spacevoice tells me that it's "initializing startup sequence".

Sometimes it stops here, sometimes it carries on to a smaller version of that screen on top of it, with a series of icons across the bottom that flash in sequence--I assume this is doing what it says!

But it stops, every time. Right now it's stuck on "Loading the Desktop". It's not what I would call a reproducible error, except in so far as it's an error every time...

Okay, well, naturally, to spite me, that time I got all the way through to a desktop. Looks most enticing! Was even able to hover over a few icons and see what they might one day do for me!

But trying to open a terminal--I'm trying to follow the steps in this thread to rebuild my goods--it just hung.

And on this restart, back to square one...

Can anyone point me in the right direction? I'll chase links and read volumes, but--this is key--I have to be able to understand what I'm reading. Keep in mind that first sentence .

Thanks for your assistance.