Quote Originally Posted by bd
Trying to run Knoppix on IBM motherboard. Pentium 3. Dates from 2000 (on screen message at startup) Machine starts up fine in Win95 or DOS but won't start up in any kind of LINUX. Have tried Knoppix 3.7 on CD and HD and also Ultimate Boot Disk CD which lets me try Toms Boot Disk LINUX, Recovery Is Possible LINUX, BasicLinux, and Trinux. All of these boot as far as "unpacking the kernel" then machine re-starts of its own accord. (I'm using Smart Boot Manager on HD to make it boot from CD if that makes any difference)
The newer versions of Knoppix agressively turn on a lot of features and frequently need cheat codes on older machines. Unfortunately, I kknow of no good way to find out what codes you might need, if that even is your problem. But you might try booting from CD with combinations of noscsi, nodma and acpi=off (all prefixed by knoppix).

If you can find one, you might also try a previous copy of Knoppix, I had great luck getting Knoppix 3.1 to boot on many machines without any cheat codes whne these systems need them with Newer versions.

And I do not expect that SBM is at all related to the problem. SBM is a great tool for booting from CD's.