CD boot hangs on "hde: drive not ready for command"

Hi

Sorry hideous newbie questions I am afraid.

Burned the Knoppix CD and verified that all was well with the iso. Placed in CD-ROM drive and rebooted machine.

Machine read the CD and flashed up the screen telling me the version of knoppix etc. and gave me the "boot:" prompt. Entered the cheat code for keybard language to set to US and it said it was loading.

Picture of the linux penguin appeared with a flashing cursor beneath and after a minute this appeared

hde: drive not ready for command
hdf: drive not ready for command

ad infiniteum

Please could someone suggest what I can do to get this to boot.

I am running an AMD 2000+ XP box with 512 of 333Mhz DDR Ram, 2x 20Gb Western Digital 20Gb drives one as primary and 1x 60 Gb Western Digital drive. the 60 and the second 20 are hanging off a Promise PCI IDE expander card.

I have a DVD ROM drive and a Yamaha burner. The machine is a dual boot Microsoft 98SE and XP build

Many thanks

First of all BladeRaptor,

Nice system!

Actually, I am not quite sure the resolve, but, the only thing I can think of, considering that the message seems to stem around the HDD's not being ready, at the point of them needing them to be, is...

Do you have Power Management enabled in your BIOS ? [ I am seriously grasping for straws here. ]

I know when my system boots, the hard drive lights stay on almost all the way through my memory check counting. Even though I have disabled the Power Management within my BIOS settings. During boot, I can here the drives spinning up to speed, and when I shut down Knoppix, after pressing the [return] at the Halted prompt, I can here the drives spin down as well.

I hope this is some help, or someone else here can give more answers or ideas - sorry that this is all I can offer :(

Cuddles

Have you tried some cheat codes ?

http://www.knoppix.net/docs/index.php/CheatCodes

At least nodma is worth trying before digging any further.

Hi thanks for the responses.

The interesting thing is that I really started looking at knoppix because I was shown the Knoppix STD version by a security professional and the ease and flexibility of use appealed.

While I was not able to get the latest version, 3.3 to work - the STD version, which is still on 3.2 - boots fine - so weird.

I do have issues on my drives - the master 20GB western digital is slowly dying and is never recognised by the system from a cold boot - I have to reset the machine at least once before it sees the drive

So the quick boot option is disabled as is power management

Bladeraptor