Knoppix 4.0 won't start to boot....

I have a bought Knoppix 4.0 DVD that won't boot. Thr computer is a stock 1.0 g NetVista IBM, and the Bios is set for 'CD' first and hard drive last. Nonetheless, it skips over the 4.0 DVD and starts on the system on the hard drive (KnoppMyth) The computer has a CD player as #1, and a DVD burner as #2. A 'live CD system (Mepis) will boot from either one, obviously, the DVD has to be in the DVD burner, but every config I've tried for the drives, skips to boot the HD. I can read the DVD, running from another system, but I can't figure how to make it boot.

You may have to take alook at Smart Boot Manager which a program loaded on to a floppy disk. The system boots from the floppy and then you can choose to boot any of the avaiable devices in a system.

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Originally Posted by UnderScore

Smart Boot Manager which a program loaded on to a floppy disk.

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I agree, if there is nothing wrong with the DVD then you may resolve the issue with SBM. But it doesn't have to be loaded on a floppy, I have it loader on the MBR and use it to boot an OS from the hard disk or from an optical disk. When you do this with an installed Linux you install SBM to the MBR and the Linux bot loader (normally lilo or grub) to the Linux partition.

Another even nicer tool is XOSL. It used SBM code to do the optical disk boots, but has a much nicer looking user interface and is a lot more powerful, worth the few minutes it takes to set it up.

I ran into this problem before to... make sure your dvd drive is +r and -r. The media might not be compatible with your drive or the file might have been corrupt when burnt.

Open the case, set the jumpers of both drives to "cable select (csel)" and put the DVD burner at the end of the IDE cable. As a result, the DVD burner should become the "master" drive for IDE channel #2.

Make also sure that you use an 80 pin IDE cable to connect your disk drives.

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Originally Posted by ockham23

Open the case, set the jumpers of both drives to "cable select (csel)" and put the DVD burner at the end of the IDE cable. As a result, the DVD burner should become the "master" drive for IDE channel #2.

Make also sure that you use an 80 pin IDE cable to connect your disk drives.

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I do not agree with ockham23's suggestion to use a CS configuration, but if you do then you absolutely do have to use an IDE2 cable, 80 wires and a blue connector on one end, or it will not work. I see no advantage at all to do this over just checking the drive jumpering and being sure that the drive you want to be seen first is jumpered as master and the other is slave, particularly if you are going to be looking at the jumper settings anyway.

Thanks for the suggestions gentlemen.

My DVD drive is a 'does it all' including + and -
I collected the info on 'Smart Boot manager' and may try a floppy boot for the experience, but my problem lies in bad media on the store-bought DVD.

I played with every which configuration of slave & master & which one is on the end of the cable, it didn't make any difference (probably in light of my later finding about the media) BTW both drives were happy with cable select (apart from not booting the bad DVD) although I didn't know about the IDE2 cable, (used what's in the machine, a 2001 IBM) I even made the DVD drive master by itself on the cable.

Testing the DVD in two other IBMs resulted in one passing on booting the DVD, and the other (brand new, fast, & a gig of ram) booting to the 'info screen'
Every click resulted in long read seissions for the DVD drive. Dmsg returned a screenfull of 'media error- bad sector' messages.

Thanks for the help & the education, I've got to go gripe at a vendor... :?

@Harry: I don't understand. What's wrong about cable select?

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Originally Posted by ockham23

@Harry: I don't understand. What's wrong about cable select?

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My biggest concern is that while hard drives usually come with a new style 80 wire IDE2 cable, the optical drives I see usually come with no cable and never with an IDE2 cable, and an older style IDE1 that will not work for CS is usually already in the case or comes with most motherboards.. While IDE1 cables can be specially manufacturered to do CS, it is a more expensive process (the cable has to be split into 3 parts and a twist added between the second and third connector) and although I've worked on a lot of computers I've never actually seen an IDE1 cable that would support CS. I have heard but not confirmed that IDE2 supports CS in it's standard form. If this is true and if the user really understands about using the right cable and not what came in his computer when he got it, then CS should work. But why should anyone do this? CS was mainly created for the sake of manufacturers, not end users. In theory it allows faster assembly because a manufacturer can have all drives jumpered the same and then they are properly configured by where they are on the cable. But for an end-user, who already has drives that are not jumpered to CS, the solution only introduces the potential for problems, such as the wrong wire now or even the wrong cable later when somone works on the system. Rather than remove both drives and change the CS settings on both drives, the user really needs only to look at both sets of jumpers to make sure one is master and the other slave; it is likely that at most one of the drives will have to be changed in such a case. They can also select which drive is master based on type of drive (putting the DVD before the CD) and/or by position in the case (helping make the drives letters in a Linux system make logical sense) rather than being totally dependent on how the IDE cable is routed.

So with no real up-side and potential downside, I see no reason for the home user to use CS on their drives.

Have you tried the linux-TAG version of 4.0? (I think release date is like 2005-06-25?