Hi. I recently installed knoppix to hd on a thinkpad t21, but today it started acting up, I cant even boot it, even when trying to run it from the cd. I've also tried booting from a DSL og Gentoo live cd disk and I get the same error message on all of them, something like:

status=0x5b {DriveReady SeekComplete DataRequest Index Error}
hda: read_intr: error= 0x04 {DriveStatusError}

it basically just hangs there, trying to hook up the hd, and after a while i get

ide0: reset: success

and the it starts looping again.

this is a machine that fell to the floor at work, and I wanted to run it with knoppix precisely because I wouldn't need a harddrive, but no matter what I do im not able to boot this machine.

any utiities or tips i could use to just run a hd check? and why do knoppix cd boot insist on waiting for the faulty HD?