Lenovo T60 without hard drive

I was trying to boot Knoppix 6.7.0 to a Lenovo T60. The hard drive was missing from the machine at the time. After entering in the boot options, (knoppix nodrm splash 2 apic=off) the machine rebooted when the screen blinked.

By "screen blinked" i mean after you enter in boot options, hit enter, and then it clears and normally starts showing the boot stuff. I see it clear, and then fade to deep black as the machine reboots. I never see a single line of text saying what it is doing.

If I put a hard drive in, it boots fine. I even tried "toram" on the boot options, but it doesn't get that far. Can anyone think of why it works with a HDD and not otherwise? this is off the CD. At first i thought it was bad memory. So I swapped that with some good stuff, and same result.

TIA.