Flickering screen (newbie question)

I have knoppix v3.3 installed on my desktop for quite sometime now. Everytime (from day one) when it starts up, after some lilo messages I get a message saying something like "Uknown mode passed press <RETURN> to check available modes or <SPACE> to go ahead or wait for 30 seconds" Till few days ago, pressing space used to work, and I was able to get into KDE. I don't remember what I did annoyed the computer and now clean starts flickering when it tries to load up 'X11' related things. I think it fails to execute some "insmod i810" module and mentions some qrong parameters are passed just before the flickering starts. I have had some problems with the HDD before which I am about to replace this soon (in next few days) but am not sure if this has got to do with HDD getting corrupt. From reading other posts, I would guess I need to start knoppix with some different startup parameters but I am not sure how to get boot prompt for knoppix installed on HDD :cry:

One thing I forgot to mention, Knoppix starts fine from CD