block-major-2 error on boot

I'm having this problem with running Knoppix 3.2 9/03 on a Desknote computer. The desknote has no floppy drive built in and I know that's the problem after reading some notes on Google, so I'm posting here as I know this is more likely a problem that laptop users will run into. Hopefully someone has found a solution.

Taking it another step, I can boot without a floppy drive okay. Knoppix seems to continue booting after the block-major-2 error is displayed twice. After booting, Knoppix recognizes my USB mouse (the first version of Knoppix to do so). BUT, when I add my USB floppy drive to the Desknote (to avoid the block-major-2 error), Knoppix still boots with a block-major-2 error and then fails to recognize my usb mouse.

Has anyone found a way to boot without a floppy or get Knoppix to recognize a usb floppy drive?

I have a Dell Inspiron 8600 without a floppy drive. I used to get the same error message twice one after the other in the same line: ``Modprobe: Can't locate block-major-2...'' I have lived with it for afew weeks until when I decided to partition C: to get an E: partition with FAT32 format to share information between Linux and WinXP. For this purpose, I used Partition Magic 8, after which the computer became unbootable. So I used the Knoppix 3.3 cd to boot the computer from CDROM drive, went into the root directory of the Debian 2.4.23-xfs-acpi-experimental I used to ran, chroot into it, and run liloconfig to create a lilo.conf file with default settings. I also said 'yes' to install the boot manager to hda with these default lilo settings. Note that the original lilo.conf file I used did not help with installing the boot manager (or may be I was installing it to the wrong place?). Then, I edited the new lilo.conf with zile and added an entry for WinXP(hda1). I ran lilo again. Now I could easily boot any of the two operating systems I had.

Then, guess what. I am not getting the modprobe error anymore! I have no idea as to how this took place internally in the computer, but it seems to be fixed by liloconfig in short.

Best,

FCC.