booting with a usb-cdrom

Ok I've tried pretty much everything. I have a usb-cdrom hooked up and it kicks me to that basic shell because it can't find the root filesystem at boot. SO I made a partition at /dev/hda2 which is fat32 and 850 megs (should be big enough to load the disc into!!)

I'm ONLY using knoppix to install gentoo from, as a launchpad. It's a long story involving my overheating laptop and using the right kernels, don't ask :P

When I boot with "fb1024x768 dma tohd=/dev/hda2" it gives the SAME error in not being able to find the file system, and kicks me to the basic shell. Any ideas?


Thanks in advance :)

you have checked the *.ISO with md5sum and done the testcd when you get the boot:? if not, do so. something is weird with the files. OR you have no usbsupport in kernel.