Your problem sounds like you have a hidden mbr giving you trouble. Boot to a DOS floppy that has fdisk on it. type : fdisk /mbr. That should fix your master boot record. If you still have a Knoppix 3.3 do a disk partition with it instead of the 3.4. This morning, I tried to hdd Knoppix 3.4 using a seperate 50mb boot secto, which it created hidden! Things got screwed up, so I went back to try a regular hdd install using hda1 and hda2 (swap). I would not take. I ended up fdisk / mbr, and using knoppix 3.3 to setup the hd. What does 3.4 report as your total partiion size. When I was having trouble, my total partitions were a little less than my hard drive, telling me there was a hidden partition.
Hope this works for you. It did for me.

Jesse