Booting Knoppix 3.6 - hangs at INIT stage

I've been trying to get knoppix working on an old desktop.
Standard boot freezes at

Code:

Probing SCSI...eata.o

So, I tried it with noscsi and can get as far as INIT stage, but then it freezes.

trying "knoppix vga=0 debug -b 3" gave me the following:

Code:

/etc/shadow: root password garbled Give root password for maintenance (or ctrl-D for normal setup)

just after the'init version 2.78 knoppix booting' mesage.
After hitting Ctrl-D I got the same freeze.
Furthermore, failsafe doesn't even work.

The computer has 256 RAM and an AMD K6 500Mhz processor.
Let me know of any other hardware specs that might be useful.

I have had a few distros working on this machine, so I dont think there's any particular unsupported hardware on it.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Shedhog

P.S. The disk is booting fine on other computers, so I presume there's no problem with that.