Now I tried booting "failsafe", and I succeeded in creating two swap files (one on each of my HDD partitions, why?).
Then I could start a KDE session.

So I hoped that Knoppix would detect the swap files on the next boot
However, booting "knoppix" (the normal way) again gives me the same problem as before.

How can I get any clues as to what went wrong in the hardware detection and swap file handling?

Regards,

Matthias