Hope someone can help.

I was given an old Sony Vaio PCG-C1VE, no floppy or CD, 112MB of Ram, camera, USB, PCMCIA, Firewire, letter-box shaped screen (1280x480), Crusoe cpu, runs Windows ME. It has a 12GB disk partitioned as an 8GB C: drive and a 4GB D: drive.

I thought it would be nice to be able to run Knoppix on it. I have a working v3.3 CD and I've managed to put the big KNOPPIX file onto the D: drive in a directory called KNOPPIX (I used a borrowed USB CD drive; can't boot from it however). I've also made a boot floppy on another machine and copied all the files to D:\BOOT (I had to go via the internet for that one).

I then patched WinME so that I can boot into Real-Dos mode with a nice little boot menu, and I downloaded Loadlin v1.6 and put that into D:\BOOT too.

So far so good.

So I power on, my (not Knoppix's) boot menu displays, I go into DOS and enter commands like:-

Code:
D:
cd BOOT
loadlin vmlinuz initrd=miniroot.gz init=/etc/init lang=en mem=112M ramdisk_size=100000 vga=ask <various other options>
I *think* it then successfully loads vmlinuz and miniroot.gz (I see lots of dots briefly then the screen clears) and, because I've specified vga=ask, I get a little text menu offering about 8 possible modes (80x24, etc...). The problem is that, no matter what mode I set, the screen then blanks and nothing else happens. No disk activity, nothing.

What I *believe* should happen is that I get the Penguin logo at the top left followed by a set of messages about hardware auto-detect etc.

I've tried quite a lot of various options (based on the Knoppix cheat codes; noapm, noacpi, nodma, noscsi, etc) but nothing seems to make any difference. I'd be very grateful for suggestions.

Thanks for your time, Alan