Ok, I had tried "debug" yesterday on the boot command line, but got a syntax error, today I tried verbose and it didn't do anything, so then in a wild random attempt I changed logging level to 5 and added both verbose and debug, and finally it started spitting out what it was doing.

It is hanging right after: "[2.0802555] Waiting for root device /dev/sdc3..." which is the SCSI drive I loaded knoppix 7.2.0 onto. My guess is that the SCSI driver is not loaded. Is there a way to tell it to load the SCSI driver someplace before here?