Knoppix Config

I have a 20gig hard drive that uses 14 gig for Windows and the remaining for Linux. The linux portion has 2 partitions hda5 and hda6. They are formatted as ext3 (I believe, anyway for Linux). I have loaded and unloaded several different flavors of Linux on these partitions and, though I am not a linux guru, have come to various conclusions regading these different flavors. Then I bought a cd of Knoppix 3.3 and was surprised at how simple the installation was. Everything worked correctly, even the dialup modem went off at the first try. I set my bios to boot from cd first and then second, the hard drive. This works just fine. If I want Linux I insert the Knoppix disk and it boots, and if I want windows I do not put the Knoppix cd in and it boots from the hard drive and thence to Windows. After a session of Knoppix I would save the configuration, and next time at the boot prompt I would type ' myconfig=/mnt/hda6', and it would come up with all the info from the previous session. So everything was great.
Then I decided to give Ubuntu a go (I bought the cd) it did not go for me. Then I tried Peanut ( also bought the cd) aand it was the pits. Next I bought Knoppix 3.9 and that, after configuring the modem and getting it working, it would dial up ok but after disconnecting from the ISP and the trying to dial up again it could not find the modem and would freeze the whole thing up.
So as Knoppix 3.3 had been so good I went back to that. But now I wanted a fresh start so at the boot prompt I just hit 'enter'
Off it went but when it got to the desktop, it had the one that I had changed it to and the whole thing locked up. I reformatted the Liux partitions and tried all sorts of stuff but I cannot get the thing to start with the original desktop. It is getting information from somewhere that I do not want it to have. And why? I do not ask it to look for old configs.
Keninkaty

I'll take a guess at it,

My guess is that when you boot up the 3.3 cd it finds an old config on your windows partition (whether it should or not) .

Take a look at your windows partition and delete anything resembling a knoppix config file , or rename it temporarily and see what happens.

Rusty, That is what I thought. I shall have to look harder to see if I can find it.
keninkaty

Weird, but maybe i missed something.

Your trying to boot a knoppix 3.3 cd and you get a previously saved desktop, right? Not a reinstall to hd? No usb stick, floppy plugged in? No rewritable cd in the other cd drive?

The brute force method: open up the box, pull the ide cables off of all the drives except the cd holding knoppix and boot. If that desktop still shows up you somehow remastered the 3.3 - congratulations but it beats me!

Perhaps more elegant: when the thing finishes booting, open a root shell and type: dmesg| grep config ( i am guessing you've done that ). The output should tell that it's found the config somewhere whilst booting.

Finally, the version of xp on one of my boxes has two windows partitions, the first holding backup info (its a hp specific thing i guess, don't know) and the second xp itself. When i have saved knoppix config, it ends up on the first partition, which is fat32. I can't remeber whether i put it there by choice or by default.

Hope this helps :)

Thankyou for your assistance. I checked the windows partition and deleted some questionable files, then rebooted the knoppix cd and lo and behold the original desktop came up!! Then I shutdown and rebooted again and we are back to square one, except it gets half way on the original desktop and locks up. Something is terribly wrong!! I am going to try some drastic action shortly.
kenin katy