Quote Originally Posted by Jaster
When booting Knoppix 3.4 from CD and after detecting hardware, process hangs when "scanning harddisks partitions and creating /etc/fstab".
It's and old Pentium II at 350MHz with 128 MB RAM.
i am also having that problem with the system freezing during the scan. i'm running on a Celeron 366MHz, 112MB RAM.
(from dmesg)
hda: QUANTUM FIREBALL EX12.7A, ATA DISK drive
hdb: MAXTOR 2F020J0, ATA DISK drive
hdc: ATAPI CD-ROM DRIVE 36X MAXIMUM, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive

only solution that i thought of was to turn off my DMA at the "boot:" prompt with "knoppix nodma". this worked for me, although i haven't a clue why. i never bothered looking up any information to see if there were any DMA problems with my specific drives or not. what drives do you have in your machine? try using "nodma", and see if there's any difference. good luck.