Sounds like a good idea. Are you saying you have tried this and it didn't work or are you just wanting to know if anyone had heard of it being done? If the adapter plugs into the IDE interface on the motherboard, I would think that as long as the bios recognizes it, so would knoppix. If you have equipment give it a try and post again keeping us informed. BTW I have seen posts about booting from the usb pen drives so I bet you could do it.