I am just trying to get Knoppix to work on an ancient old machine of mine - it's actually a victim of Intel's promotion to upgrade old 486s to Pentiums. :P

Anyway, I have got a swapfile created, so I have barely enough RAM to just do runlevel 2. My friend and I got it to work with the computer's original CD drive (I think we used "failsafe" in the boot). So, we got greedy and tried to use other, faster CD-ROM drives that were lying around nearby.

After much switching on IDE cables and the CD-ROM drive, we're back to the original 1x CD-ROM drive, with the hard drive set to Primary Master and the old CD-ROM drive set to Primary Slave (I think the old setup I had was D: on Slave, HD on Master, except now if I do that the computer won't start, as if the IDE cables are in backwards).

What usually happens in the boot sequence is Knoppix recognizes the HDD and CD-ROM drive as hdx (random letter in x), and lists its name, etc., then scans all the other filesystems for the Knoppix CD. I have to use boot floppies because this computer's BIOS is too old to boot from the CD drive :P

Scanning for the CD doesn't take very long. Although all the filesystem names flash by so fast, I don't think it even tries to scan /scd0 (and if it does, it happens in about a tenth of a second, with no results). It seems that the hard drive I acquired had Windows 95 already installed on it, and it can't read the D: either. Is it possible that my original CD-ROM drive has been damaged, or am I just a klutz with hardware?

SUMMARY: CD drive can't find Knoppix. No worky. How to fix?