Thanks for the info atrick -- especially that forum which I hadn't seen before.

I am, of course, trying to do this on a tight (nil) budget so I'm not keen to buy any equipment. My latest idea is to remove the disk from the Vaio and use a USB drive caddie, that I can borrow from work, to connect it to my desktop. Then I should be able to run Knoppix on the desktop and issue lilo config commands for the notebook disk (I hope).

It all sounds very dodgy but at least once I get the notebook disk connected to my desktop I can also backup the existing partitions before potentially destroying them.

It's a shame I haven't been able to get Loadlin to work. My recent investigations have led me to the conclusion that either:

a) Loadlin is hanging during some sort of cpou mode switch
b) Loading of vmlinuz or initrd.gz is overwriting some special I/O buffer or address
c) There is some sort of device being probed very early on in the startup which hangs for Knoppix

I have heard rumours that the PCG-C1VE disk may be hard to extract and may not fit a standard laptop disk caddie. I'm also not 100% sure I know how to configure that disk using lilo so that when I put it back in the Vaio it will boot into either Dos (on the C: partition) or compressed Knoppix (stored on the D: partition).

Any helpful suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Alan