RUNNING from the HD, rather than installing, or CD boot?

[Markp.com]

I have an old laptop and want to play with Knoppix. Unfortunatly, the CD drive is broken on the machine.

So I've created a boot disk and copied the CD across on the the HD.

I put in the boot disk and restarted. Everything is fine boots as normal, but gets to the point where it would normally boot Knoppix from the CD, obviously it can't do this, so asks where knoppix is!

It boots me into a mini os of some description where I can mount certain drives.

So I presume I just mount my harddisk, then run knoppix from the disk? I'm not sure how and no matter what combination of "mount hda1" I type it keeps giving me "bad address" errors.

Is there anyway I can RUN knoppix off my harddrive?

[Markp.com]

Ok, so I've got it to boot from the HD with the cheat code:
"bootfrom=/dev/hda1/Knoppix/"

But its not detecting my memory correctly, so I'm off to investigate that now!

[Markus]

There's a cheatcode for that too: mem=???M

[Markp.com]

There's a cheatcode for that too: mem=???M

Yeah, I found that... so my start line now reads:
knoppix mem=119M bootfrom=/dev/hda1/knoppix

and that starts to boot fine, then all of a sudden tells me I don't have enough memory to run, so boots me into X11 rather than KDE.

The error message is: "xmessage: Not enough memory to start kde! (Atleast 82MB required.)"

When my system starts up and does a memory count, it says I have 119MB of memory (so thats what I put in to the command prompt) the boot can't be using more than 30MB of memory can it?!

The full system spec is P800, (I thought I had 256MB of ram! But I guess not) 119M and its a laptop, if you didn't read that above

Any ideas on how I can get the laptop to boot into KDE?

[Markus]

119MB should be enough for X but you could also try with a lighter gui, like desktop=icewm
Try also booting with memtest while I suspect your memory could be bad. OTOH if you read through the cheat codes page you knew about this allready.
How about throwing in a DOS floppy and typing mem, or was it mem /h. A while since my dos days.

[Markp.com]

IceWM works fine... I can't work out why this isn't working... I'll try my other memory thing in the mean time, but if you lot have any idea of what I can do in the mean time, let me know

[Markus]

If icewm works, keep it and forget about kde if you really don't need all the kde apps and candy.
OTOH if you upgrade often and want to iron out the bugs in kde...
Personally I use kde, while in some strange way I don't seem to care about the occasional bug.
You might want to take a peek around the bios as some laptops have bios settings for how much memory is allocated to video, 8-16MB should be enough if you're not into games.

[Markp.com]

I like KDE though I'll try Gnome, see if that works any better

Thanks for your help so far!

M