Thanks I have tried that, but am still at a loss. The system begins to boot, then switches to runlevel 0 on its own, and halts.

I can only get it to boot by entering single-user mode and issuing 'init 2' .

I have since reinstalled knoppix using knoppix-installer, and upgraded with debian-specific debs. Exact same problem..

What could be causing the system to enter runlevel 0 on its own, during boot? My hdd is clean, and it's not being fsck'd , and nothing out of the ordinary appears to be happening except for this.