Can't run from CD with Hard Drive connected!

I have been pulling my hair out since Christmas. Ran 3.6 from CDRW with no HD in box since last summer when HD died.
Got a new HD and installed it as Master with CDRW as slave. Knoppix appears to detect all the hardware then stops. I get to a screen where there is a penguin and "Welcome to KNOPPIX Live-Linux-on-CD" and it quits there. The drives spin down and it will sit with no further activity. In failsafe mode I will get to a root prompt but I cannot enter anything as the KB appears locked up. I have tried every combination of cheat code I can think of. If I disconnect the HD then I get to a point where I get a black screen but the KB works and I can eventually get to a point where I can configure the Xserver and from there load knoppix and everything works.

I will welcome any input. I am running another distro on the computer right now, same hardware, HD connected and OS installed on it. I would like my Knoppix back, tho.

Sounds like you need to experiment with cheat codes and find the right one or combination of right ones that will help you boot. If you have an old version before 3.3 try that and see if it boots without cheat codes (if it does then I really expect it's a cheat codes issue, if not then I'm stumpped). Unfortunately, I know of no good way to find the right combination of cheat codes for you, but I would suggest various combinations of nodma, noscsi and acpi=off (but only because these are the things that have worked for me).

Also, you say the CD drive is set up as the slave. Most MBs have two IDE ports available, and the most common way to configure a system is to put the HD or HDs on the first IDE connector and the CD drives on the second, with the boot CD (and CD burner if you only have one) as the primary on the second IDE cable. I would recommend tossing in another IDE cable and jumpering your CD drive as master (never use cable select) if you have a second IDE connector. And always attach both ends of an IDE cable, if you leave an open connector it should be the middle one, not the one on the end of the cable. This alone might solve your problem.

how have you strapped the CDRW?? make sure it is set to slave and disk to master, better still would be one chanel for the cd and one fro the hd and both as masters.

Well, the whole reason the cd is slaved off the same IDE connector is that on this Mobo (which otherwise has worked fine for years, and I pulled out of the garbage to begin with) only the secondary IDE connector works. The bios will not see anything connected to the primary IDE connector, never has. The obvious choice would be a new motherboard.

However, so far I have run RedHat, Mandrake, Xandros, and some other distros with no problem. They all see the Master HD and Slave CDRW on the secondary port and all is well.

I just like Knoppix and am trying to find a way to make a hard drive install. I'll keep trying the cheat codes, but I swear I must have hit every combination.

Thanks for the input.