Well, I tried booting from LiveCd with nofstab but I got an error message (I don't remember the message now.) So I booted again with the failsafe mode. Cfdisk showed only one partition, hda1, which is my Win98 "C" disk. Not much help, but someone had suggested that the stall was being caused by a problem reading some device. And as I mentioned in a prior message, I have a Smart Card reader and an HP T1000e tape drive that are a little unusual.

Anyway, I put a card in the Smart Media reader and the LiveCD booted without a stall at fstab! So, for some reason, the boot process was stalling because there was no media in the reader. Cfdisk still shows only hda1, but the desktop shows both cdroms, my floppy, hda1, hdb1 and sda1. Hdb1 is my WinXP "D" drive with NTFS file system. Sda1 is my Smart Card reader which Knoppix is apparently "seeing" as a SCSI drive.

Thanks for all of the help on this problem.

jimbo