You mentioned that you set the BIOS, but that it refuses to boot off the CD, why? Does the CD spin, (NO)

light on the drive come on? (NO)

Does it display anything that would be associated with Knoppix? (NO)

the system stops at something like " Booting from ATAPI CD" in dos mode and stays there for approx 30 mins and i had to assume that it hangs
Since the cdrom not reading your cd, try that cd on other pc, see if it's okay.
If it can boot from other cd then you can try boot using smart boot manager's floppy to bypass bios problem:
http://btmgr.webframe.org/index.php3?body=download.html